Awards

Grammy Award - 1983

Best Spoken Word Recording

Performance: Aaron Copland's: Lincoln Portrait

About David Effron

As a highly sought-after conductor, David Effron's 50-year-career has included appearances with major symphonies and opera companies throughout North America, Europe, Mexico, and the Far East.

For 18 years, he was on the conducting staff of the New York City Opera, where he conducted many performances, not only in New York, but also with the City Opera residencies in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

He has been the music director of the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra and the artistic director of the Central City (Colo.) Opera and the Brevard Music Center (N.C). For 10 years, he was the general music director of the Heidelberg (Germany) Castle Festival. After his tenure as music director of the Music School Festival Orchestra in Chautauqua, N.Y., an annual award—the David Effron Fellowship—was established through the generosity of Kay Logan. The fellowship, now in its fifteenth year, enables up-and-coming young conductors to participate in this unique summer festival.

As a prominent educator, Effron taught at the Curtis Institute of Music and for 21 years, was head of the orchestral program at the Eastman School of Music, where he trained hundreds of instrumentalists now in professional orchestras worldwide.

His conducting students presently hold music director positions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South America. Since 1998, he has been an active conductor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he is chair of the Orchestral Conducting Department. He is especially honored and humbled that he has conducted opera productions of Der Rosenkavalier, Wozzeck, and Peter Grimes as well as 6 of the 10 Mahler symphonies at Indiana University.

Effron was the conductor of the Grammy Award-winning recording of Copland's Lincoln Portrait narrated by William Warfield. His discography also includes a Pantheon recording with soprano Benita Valente, which won the German Record Critics' Award. Effron joined forces with flutist James Galway for an RCA recording of John Corigliano's Pied Piper Fantasy, winning a top prize from Ovation magazine.

Effron holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Indiana University. He was an assistant to Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch at the Cologne (Germany) Opera House. He has been a Fulbright scholar and a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. He was named Musician of the Year by the National Federation of Music Clubs, and was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from North Carolina State University.

Effron has conducted 105 operas and most of the standard symphonic works.