More prizes: Minnesota baton is 2018 Solti winner

More prizes: Minnesota baton is 2018 Solti winner

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norman lebrecht

May 23, 2018

The $30,000 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award has been given to Roderick Cox, Associate Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, it was announced this morning.

Comments

  • David says:

    We attended a performance last season with Mr. Cox conducting. I was expecting a tepid performance of Tchaik 4, I was happy to hear an inspired performance, it was terrific.

    congratulations to him.

  • Michael B. says:

    I hope that Maestro Cox has his European contacts lined up. The reality is that African-American conductors in the United States are generally limited to the occasional pops concert and the obligatory Martin Luther King Day concert. Jonathon Heyward recently won the Grand Prize at the Besançon International Conducting Competition, the youngest conductor to ever win that award, and has been conducting at the Basel Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, and other European ensembles. He was just named Assistant Conductor at the Hallé Orchestra of Liverpool. He had to fill in on short notice at the Los Angeles Philharmonic when illness forced Miguel Harth-Bedoya to withdraw and earned extraordinarily positive reviews. Yet, there has been no rush to consider him for even a mid-level position in the United States. He will probably have to make his career in Europe.

    • Bruce says:

      Depressing, but probably true.

      • Klaus says:

        There are many truly great African American Conductors of today and even yesterday that are going unrecognized. Even Jorma Panula, the “Maestro of Maestros” studied with one- Dean Dixon.

        I truly hope that the concert halls become less segregated on the stage.

    • Saxon Broken says:

      Michael writes: “He will have to make his career in Europe”

      This is actually pretty much true of American conductors regardless of whether they are black or white. For some reason American orchestras like to appoint foreigners, particularly Europeans, to their chief conductor jobs, believing Europeans to be “better”. San Francisco is pretty much the only top orchestra job currently occupied by a US born conductor (and Tilson Thomas had proved himself in Europe at the LSO beforehand).

    • James says:

      Sorry to nitpick, but the (great) Halle Orchestra is based in Manchester, not Liverpool.

  • Phillip Ayling says:

    I’m waiting for Brandon Keith Brown to check in so that I can understand what this actually means.

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