YOEL LEVI, Music Director Emeritus

Following his departure from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra after the 1999-2000 season, Yoel Levi was named the orchestra's Music Director Emeritus. The appointment is for a period of five years and calls for Levi to conduct the orchestra twice a season, beginning in 2001-02. In addition the Flemish Radio Orchestra named him its Music Artistic Advisor last June, and he recently was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In June of 2001 he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of the most prestigious awards given by the French Government.

While he was Music Director of the ASO from 1988 to 2000, Mr. Levi's impact on the orchestra was summed up by Gramophone magazine, which said, "Yoel Levi has built a reputation for himself and his orchestra that is increasingly the envy of his Big Five American counterparts in New York Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, and Chicago." Among his many ASO milestones are a highly successful performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection") featuring the award-winning ASO Chorus in New York's Avery Fisher Hall, a featured role at the Opening Ceremony of the Centennial Olympic Games in July 1996, an extensive and critically acclaimed European tour by the ASO in 1991, and nomination of the ASO as "Best Orchestra of the Year" for 1991-92 by the first annual International Classical Music Awards.

Mr. Levi's conducting engagements have included appearances with orchestras in London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Rome, Frankfurt, Munich, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Israel, Korea, and Japan. In North America he has conducted the New York Philharmonic and the orchestras of Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Washington, Minnesota, Toronto, and Montreal, among others. In 1991 he was invited to conduct the Stockholm Philharmonic in performance at the Nobel Prize Ceremony.

He made his opera-conducting debut in 1997 at the Teatro Communale in Florence, Italy, leading eight performances of La fanciulla del West in nine days. Making his North American operatic debut with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2000, he conducted 13 performance of Carmen.

Mr. Levi has made 36 recordings on different labels and different orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra, London Philharmonic, and Philharmonia Orchestra. Thirty of these are with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for Telarc International, devoted to music by Barber, Beethoven, Brahms, Copland, Dvorák, Hindemith, Kodály, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky.

In 1997 Mr. Levi was awarded the honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and he also gave the commencement address.

Though born in Romania, Mr. Levi grew up in Israel. He studied at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music, where he received a master of Arts degree with distinction, and at the Jerusalem Academy of Music under Mendi Rodan. He also studied with Franco Ferrara in Sienna and Rome, with Kiril Kondrashin in Holland, and at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He received First Prize in the 1978 Conductors' International competition in Besançon, France, and became an assistant to Lorin Maazel at the Cleveland Orchestra for six years, serving as Resident Conductor from 1980 to 1984.