A Venezuelan takes another US orchestra

The Alabama Symphony has announced Carlos Izcaray as its next music director. He succeeds Justin Brown, who is British.

A conductor’s son, Carlos Izcaray, 37, presently lives in Germany but will move to Alabama.

His bio relates: At age 3 he was enrolled in Venezuela’s public system of youth orchestras, continuing later from age 7 at the Emil Friedman Conservatory, one of the few schools in the world that promotes music as the root and essence of education. There, he was a boy chorister as well as an instrumentalist. He studied conducting with his father since he was a teenager, and went on to become a distinguished fellow at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen.