The year 2010 was an especially active one in which Phillips recorded a Naxos CD of music by William Perry with the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland; conducted in France with the Orchestre du Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional d’Angers and dance company Marie-Laure Agrapart et Cie, leading the premiere staged production of Anthony Burgess's Shakespeare ballet Mr W.S.; guest conducted at Manhattan School of Music; and led Commonwealth Opera’s annual Messiah Sing. As pianist, he accompanied several concerts for Opera Providence. His reduced orchestration of Stravinsky’s opera Mavra was published by Boosey and Hawkes and performed at the Glyndebourne Festival. His book A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess was published by Manchester University Press, an article on Burgess appeared in The Journal of Music, and his essay “Burgess and Music” was included in the new Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange. Upcoming conducting engagements include a staged production of Cosi fan tutte with Opera Providence in June 2011.
Phillips began his conducting career with posts in Germany at the Frankfurt Opera and Stadttheater Lüneburg. Later, in the US, he held positions with the Greensboro Symphony, Savannah Symphony, Maryland Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Greensboro Opera, and Young Artists Opera Theatre, as well as multiple choirs, youth orchestras, and chamber orchestras. He has conducted over fifty orchestras worldwide, including the Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Memphis Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Spokane Symphony, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and Choir, and Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with which he recorded two CDs on the ITM label. He has also conducted numerous opera companies, choirs, and dance troupes, including the Boston Academy of Music, Opera Providence, Commonwealth Opera, Boston's Masterworks Chorale, Hampshire Choral Society, Wisconsin Dance Ensemble, and Festival Ballet Providence.
Under his leadership since 1989, the Brown University Orchestra has become recognized as one of the top university orchestras in the US, winning seven ASCAP Awards and performing with such illustrious soloists as Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, Christopher O’Riley, Eugenia Zukerman, Carol Wincenc, Sergiu Luca, and the Dave Brubeck Quartet. In 2006-07, Phillips led the Brown Orchestra on a New Year’s concert tour of China, performing in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Suzhou, Changzhou, and Ningbo. They have also performed in New York at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall as well as in Boston, Cambridge, and Montreal. In 2006, Daniel Barenboim conducted the orchestra during his residency at Brown with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Barry Bostwick, Kate Burton, Oskar Eustis, Bill Harley, Governor Lincoln Chafee, and Brown University President Ruth Simmons are among those who have narrated works with Phillips and the Brown Orchestra.
As Music Director and Conductor since 1994, Phillips has led the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus to new artistic heights, securing its position as one of the preeminent musical organizations in western Massachusetts. He has spearheaded collaborative projects with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Hampshire Choral Society, Old Deerfield Productions, Amherst Ballet, glass artist Josh Simpson, and other artists and arts organizations throughout the region, and led the PVS in memorable performances of Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler’s Second and Fifth Symphonies, the Verdi and Brahms Requiems, La Traviata, The Rite of Spring, The Planets, Carmina Burana, and Ellis Island: The Dream of America. Under his leadership, the PVS has won an ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, issued recordings on the Living with the Classics CD box set produced by Arizona University Recordings, participated in the Ford Made in America and EarShot projects, and been profiled three times in Symphony Magazine, most recently in the Winter 2011 issue.
With a conducting repertoire of over 1000 works, Phillips has conducted much of the standard repertoire, including opera and musical theatre ranging from Don Giovanni to Sweeney Todd. He enjoys jazz and has led concerts featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, and other popular artists. A strong believer in the importance of music in the lives of young people, he has worked extensively with student musicians and audiences as Youth Concert Conductor of the Maryland Symphony for fourteen years and as conductor of numerous youth and All-State orchestras. In collaboration with two-time Grammy Award winner Bill Harley, he has composed and arranged pieces for youth concerts that are performed by orchestras throughout the country.
After attending the Eastman School of Music as a composition-piano double major, Phillips graduated cum laude in music from Columbia University, later earning graduate degrees in composition and conducting from Columbia and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, respectively. He pursued additional studies at the Salzburg “Mozarteum”, Académie internationale d'été in Nice, Eastman, Music Academy of the West, Aspen, and Tanglewood. His teachers include Karel Husa, Warren Benson, Fred Lerdahl, and Vladimir Ussachevsky in composition; Samuel Adler in orchestration; and Dorothy Payne, Allen Forte, and George Perle in music theory. His conducting teachers include Kurt Masur, Gunther Schuller, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Leonard Bernstein.
Phillips has composed numerous concert works and well as music for theatre, film, and television. His music received many prizes, including awards from the New England String Ensemble, American Music Center, and ASCAP, and been performed nationally and abroad. His works include War Music, a music theatre work commissioned and premiered in 2005 by the performance ensemble Aurea, and War Music Suite, for vocal soloists and orchestra, premiered by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra in 2009. Other recent works include A/B, a composition for actor and chamber ensemble premiered at the 2007 FirstWorksProv Festival, and Battle-Pieces, a song cycle on poems by Herman Melville. As a pianist, Phillips has recorded for film and television, and performed at the Mohawk Trail Concerts, Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Lincoln Center.
Considered the leading authority on the music of composer-novelist Anthony Burgess, Phillips is the author of A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, the first comprehensive study of Burgess’s music and its relationship to his writings. His other writings on Burgess have been published in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; The Anthony Burgess Newsletter; Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange; Anthony Burgess and Modernity; Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and Literature in Music; The Journal of Music; and the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange. Phillips has also lectured widely on Burgess and is a featured commentator in the BBC television documentary The Burgess Variations. His publications on other musical subjects include the article “The Enigma of Variations: A Study of Stravinsky’s Final Work for Orchestra” (Music Analysis, 1984), which, in his book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Richard Taruskin called “the best exposition in print of Stravinsky’s serial methods.”
Phillips currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center and is a member of the American Musicological Society, ASCAP (composer and publisher), College Music Society, Conductors Guild (Board member, 2006-08), and the League of American Orchestras. He is also a member of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, England (Editorial Board member, 2005-present), and the Anthony Burgess Center in Angers, France. For further information, please visit his website at www.paulsphillips.com.