Benjamin Zander #716

I met this beautiful soul on the street in Martha’s Vineyard and we immediately launched into the most incredible conversation. Benjamin Zander is the co-author of The Art of Possibility and the founder of the Boston Philharmonic as well as its current conductor. We weave our way in and out of some wonderful places and this is inspired dialogue. Please join us for the ride.

For the past 50 years Benjamin Zander has occupied a unique place as a master teacher, deeply insightful and probing interpreter, and as a profound source of inspiration for audiences, students, professional musicians, corporate leaders, politicians and more. He has persistently engaged well-informed musical and public intellectuals in a quest for insight and understanding into the western musical canon and the underlying spiritual, social, and political issues that inspired its creation.

Zander started his musical life as a composer and cellist. At age twelve, he began studying composition under Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst. At fifteen, he left home to train for five years in Florence and Cologne with the great Spanish cellist, Gaspar Cassadó. After completing his degree at the University of London, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship which brought him to the United States. In 1965, he settled in Boston where he began his journey as a conductor.

Zander founded the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978 and has appeared as guest conductor with orchestras around the world. His performances have inspired thousands of musicians, renewed their sense of idealism, and shed fresh, insightful, and sometimes provocative light on the interpretation of the central symphonic repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries. Critics and the public have been united in their praise of Zander’s interpretations of the central repertory.