KIRK TREVOR - CONDUCTOR

Internationally known conductor,recording artist and teacher Kirk Trevor is a regular guest conductor in the world’s concert halls. Music Director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra from 1985 until 2003, he is currently music Director of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra since 1988, and the Missouri Symphony since 2000. Renowned as an orchestra builder, he has brought all of his orchestras to the forefront of community identity and involvement. In Indianapolis, Trevor has created a strong community identity for one of America’s busiest Chamber orchestras. In addition to its eight concert subscription series, the orchestra partners with nearly all of Indianapolis’ major cultural institutions in the field of opera, choral music, and the visual arts. In Missouri, Trevor is quickly establishing a community presence with new programs for young people as well as innovative collaborative programs with regional arts groups including theatre companies and visual artists. He is also collaborating with cutting edge artists to present concerts that bridge boundries between classical and contemporary popular culture, including rap and video games.

Born and educated in England, Trevor trained at London’s Guildhall School of Music where he graduated cum laude in cello performance and conducting. He was a conducting student of the late Sir Adrian Boult and Vilem Tausky. He went on to pursue cello studies in France with Paul Tortelier under a British Council Scholarship and came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Exchange Grant. It was in the U.S. that his conducting skills led him to the position of Resident Conductor of the Dallas Symphony. He conducted the Dallas Symphony in a wide range of concerts in the U.S. and abroad, working closely on recordings and musical projects with the late Eduardo Mata. In 1990 he was recognized as one of America’s outstanding young conductors, winning the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Leonard Bernstein Conducting Competition. Trevor is becoming widely recognized as one of the leading conducting teachers in the world. He has been a master teacher for the American Symphony Orchestra League as well as the Conductor’s Guild. In 1991 Trevor co-founded and has been Artistic Director of the International Workshop for Conductors held in the Czech Republic for a month every summer. IWC is the world’s largest conducting school, each year training over 80 conductors from 20 countries. Trevor has been Director of Orchestras at both the Univeristy of Tennessee and Ball State University. He continues to work with young conductors around the world in master classes and workshops.

In 2000 Trevor forged a new relationship with the famed Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava. With the SRSO he began a new series of recordings of American music for a consortium of independent record companies. To date, he has made more than fifty albums of new American music as part of this ongoing project, including complete albums of music by Lee Actor, Karen Amrhein, Florencio Asenjo, Jeremy Beck, James Cohn, Carson Cooman, David Dzubay, Dan Locklair, William Thomas McKinley,and most recently Judith Zaimont In addition he has recorded new albums with outstanding soloists including Richard Stoltzman, John Manasse, Debra Richtmeyer, and Richard Fredrickson. Trevor has also recorded music for best selling computer games including “Diablo II”.

In 2006 Trevor began a new collaboration with Naxos Records to record nineteenth century violin composers as well as American composers in their American Classics series. To date, Trevor has nine new albums in the Naxos catalog. With almost eighty releases since 1997, it makes Trevor one of the world’s most recorded conductors in the past decade.

In March and April of 2003 Trevor conducted ten concerts with the SRSO on a tour of Japan. Critics were universal in their praise of the orchestra and Trevor’s leadership. In the spring of 2004 Trevor led the orchestra on an European Premiere tour of “Oratorio Terezin”, a new oratorio based on the poems of the children of Terezin, the Nazi work camp where thousands of children of Jewish artists and intelligentsia were killed. In 2005 Trevor went on to conduct this same work throughout Israel with the Israel Chamber Orchestra and Chorus.

As a guest conductor he has appeared with over forty Orchestras in twelve countries. Recent appearances included the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Estonian National Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y Leon, Virginia Symphony, Savannah Symphony, Sofia Philharmonic and Bern Chamber Orchestra. In 2003 he made his London Symphony Orchestra debut and in 2007 his Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Chamber Orchestra.

 

Trevor is an avid collector, including an extensive collection of nineteenth-century British stamps and an unusually fine collection of antique powder compacts. As an avid sportsman he plays golf, tennis and soccer. Trevor is married to the Slovak harpist Maria Duhova and they have two young children, two year old Sylvia and six-month-old Daniel.

Trevor’s twenty one-year-old daughter Chloe, is frequently appearing as a solo violinist on the world’s concert stages, sometimes with her father as conductor. The Trevors maintain homes in Bratislava, Indianapolis and Missouri.