A former student of Herbert Von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein and a graduate of the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Robert Hart Baker is one of the most experienced conductors of his generation, with a vast repertoire from Bach to Stravinsky. Among the more than 1000 concerts he has led have been complete cycles of the Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky symphonies and Strauss tone poems, in addition to most of the orchestral works of Mahler, Dvorak, Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Ernest Bloch. As a guest conductor he has appeared with many American orchestras, including Billings, Chattanooga, Flagstaff, Harrisburg, Muskegon, Providence, and Radio City Music Hall to name but a few.
His recent international guest conducting engagements have been with the Orquestra do Norte in Porto, Portugal, the State Philharmonic Orchestra in Vratza, Bulgaria, and the State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra in Toluca, Mexico. He has also appeared as guest conductor with the orchestras of Szeged, Hungary; Sabadell, Spain; Messina, Italy; Pusan, Korea; and Zurich, Switzerland. Fluent in French, German and Italian, he is equally at home with opera. He has appeared as an opera conductor with the Spoleto Festival, Brevard Music Center, Connecticut, and Cullowhee Festival opera companies. He served as an assistant conductor to Christian Badea and Gian Carlo Menotti for six summers in Italy. He has conducted the North Carolina Dance Theatre ballet company on three occasions. He recently stepped in on short notice for Maestro Enrique Batiz to conduct a full ballet production of Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet in Lecce, Italy with the Balletto del Sud. His upcoming schedule for 2005-06 includes guest conducting the Regina Symphony in Canada, the Quincy Symphony in Illinois, and appearances in Mexico and Bulgaria.
As a conductor, he has collaborated on multiple concertos with many of today's leading soloists, including pianists Andre Watts, Dickran Atamian, Misha Dichter, Claude Frank, Sergei Edelmann, Eric Himy, Alexander Peskanov, Jon Klibonoff, Richard Frank, Leonid Kuzmin, Constanine Orbelian, Christopher O'Riley, Thomas Pandolfi, Natasha Paremski, and Dmitri Ratser, violinists Daniel Heifetz, Pamela Frank, Mark Peskanov, Philip Quint, Eugene Drucker, Ilya Kaler, Xiang Gao and Pip Clarke, violists Paul Neubauer and Andy Simionescu, cellists Carter Brey, Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Gaisford, Scott Kluksdahl, David Finckel, Richard Hirschl and Paul Tobias, French hornist Richard Todd, trumpeters David Hickman and Ronald Romm, and English hornist Thomas Stacy.
Maestro Baker is committed to the training and education of young musicians. He served as Adjunct Associate Professor of Music and Interim Chair at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and has taught at Mars Hill College, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and the State University of New York at Purchase. He is the former Music Director of the New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, and conductor laureate of the York (PA) Youth Symphony. He has also been a guest faculty member at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. He recently joined the adjunct faculty of Penn State York.
Robert can count many of the music world's leading figures among his private teachers. Born in New York, he began playing the oboe at age 9, and continued his musical studies at the Manhattan School of Music and the Horace Mann School, where his teachers included Johannes Somary, Henry Bloch, and Henry Schuman. He holds a diploma in conducting from the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria, where he made his professional conducting debut at age 17 after studies with Herbert von Karajan, and a diploma in oboe from the Summer Academy in Nice, France, where he studied with Lucien Debray. He is a cum laude graduate of Harvard, where conducted the Bach Society Orchestra for two seasons, while studying conducting privately with Leonard Bernstein and James Yannatos, and oboe with Ralph Gomberg. His early training included conducting rehearsals of the Indianapolis, Baltimore, and Quebec Symphonies.
He holds two master's degrees and a doctorate in conducting from the Yale School of Music, where he studied conducting with Otto-Werner Mueller and Arthur Weisberg, and oboe with Robert Bloom and Ronald Roseman. Robert was the founding Music Director of the Connecticut Philharmonic Orchestra at age 22, receiving critical acclaim for its debut in Boston Symphony Hall. A scholar in American music, he worked on closely on projects with composers Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Suzanne Bloch while at Yale, where he also gave lectures on score reading and analysis as a graduate assistant. He did extensive research on the manuscripts of orchestral works by Horatio Parker (better known as the teacher of Charles Ives) and Paul Hindemith. Robert is also an expert on the music of Caryl Florio (born William Robjohn), the London-born organist who became composer-in-residence at the famed Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC in the early 20th century.
Robert was awarded an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from York College of Pennsylvania, and has received two awards from the American Society of Composers, Publishers & Authors for contemporary music programming. He has recorded with several record labels, including Aurefon, Ernest Bloch Society, and Sonari. His arrangement of the Borodin Nocturne is currently available on compact disc from Vanguard Records played by the English Chamber Orchestra. While in London, he studied the symphonies of Haydn and oratorios of Handel from original manuscripts at the British Museum. Robert, an active oboist, is married to Barbra Duvall Baker, flutist and jazz vocalist. They have appeared in joint recital at the Palaces of St. Petersburg Chamber Music Festival in Russia, and recently played on the Performers of Westchester Chamber Music Series in New York. The busy musical couple raises and rides Paso Fino and Andalusian horses in their spare time.