about CBASO music director DAVID KATZ

David Katz is one of the most versatile performing artists currently working in the Chicago area. Award-winning composer, guest conductor of more than sixty orchestras and opera companies in the United States, Canada and Mexico, David is now celebrating his 25th season as the founding music director of The Chicago Bar Association Symphony Orchestra. During his long tenure, Chicagoland’s unique all-lawyer ensemble has performed more than one hundred times, in repertoire ranging from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial By Jury to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

David' guest appearances include concerts with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Mississippi Symphony and Corpus Christi Symphony. Former associate conductor of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra under music director Margaret Hillis, and for twelve years music director of the Adrian Symphony Orchestra and co-founder of Opera!Lenawee in Michigan, Katz is currently artistic director of Hat City Music Theater and the Candlewood Symphony in Connecticut, and serves The American Prize, the national performing arts competitions, as Chief Judge. Also a professional playwright, actor and arts advocate, Katz tours internationally in his acclaimed one-man play, MUSE of FIRE, about the secrets of conducting, which he presented at Theater Building Chicago in 2008.

David Katz holds baccalaureate and master’s degrees in composition and conducting from the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford. He was a student of the great Lithuanian maestro, Vytautas Marijosius, and was the first in the school’s history to be awarded an Artist’s Diploma in Conducting.  Katz also studied for five years under Maestro Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Maine, and later founded Opera Maine, the Monteux Opera Festival, and the Chamber Orchestra of Maine. He has partnered such artists as Itzhak Perlman and Misha Dichter in concert and has worked with some of the greatest composers of the age, including William Schuman, Hans Werner Henze, Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter. Katz’s own compositions are published by Carl Fischer and G. Schirmer, among others.