Other speakers for the “Best of Our State” weekend will include John Hart, New York Times best-selling author; Connie Regan Blake, nationally known storyteller; humorist Charles Petty; Cecelia Budd Grimes, author of “What It Means To Be Southern” series of books; Carol Buie-Jackson, gardener and wildlife enthusiast; and David Brook, director of the Division of Historical Resources, Office of Archives and History.

Entertainment for the weekend will include the UNC Clef Hangers, Carolina’s oldest a cappella group, and Al Batten & The Bluegrass Reunion.

For more information about the “Best of Our State,” call Amy Wood, Our State marketing director, at 800-948-1409. For reservations, call the Grove Park Inn at 800-438-5800.

John Mauceri
John Mauceri has been Chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts since 2006. He is also the Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and musical adviser to Walt Disney’s Educational Productions. His distinguished and extraordinary career has taken him not only to the world’s greatest opera companies and symphony orchestras, but also the musical stages of Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the most prestigious halls of academia.
 
Mauceri has served as music director of four opera companies: Washington (National), Scottish (Glasgow), the Teatro Regio (Turin, Italy), and Pittsburgh. He is the first American to have held the post of music director of an opera house in either Great Britain or Italy. He was the first music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall after its founding director, Leopold Stokowski, with whom he studied. He was Consultant for Music Theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more than a decade, and, for 15 years, he served on the faculty of Yale University. For 18 years, Mr. Mauceri worked closely with Leonard Bernstein and conducted many of the composer’s premieres at Bernstein’s request.
 
On Broadway, he was co-producer of On Your Toes and served as musical supervisor for Hal Prince’s production of Candide as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance. He also conducted the orchestra for the film version of Evita. Among his many awards and honors are a Tony, Grammy, Billboard, Olivier, and two Emmys.

Chancellor Mauceri holds the lifetime title of Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which was created for him in 1991 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with whom he led more than 300 concerts to a total audience of more than 4 million people. He has written for and appeared on radio and television and has delivered keynote speeches and papers for major artistic and educational institutions, such as Harvard University, the American Academy in Berlin, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Musicological Society, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Mauceri has taken the lead in the preservation and performance of many genres of music and has supervised/conducted important premieres by composers as diverse as Debussy, Stockhausen, Korngold, Hindemith, Bernstein, Ives, Elfman, and Shore. He is a leading performer of music banned by the Third Reich and especially music of Hollywood’s émigré composers, and can be seen and heard on many recent DVD releases of classic films.

Upcoming events include Porgy and Bess with Washington National Opera and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) with the UNCSA Symphony Orchestra in both Winston-Salem and Raleigh, for the reopening of the North Carolina Museum of Art in the spring.

University of North Carolina School of the Arts
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts is the first state-supported, residential school of its kind in the nation. Established as the North Carolina School of the Arts by the N.C. General Assembly in 1963, UNCSA opened in Winston-Salem (“The City of the Arts”) in 1965 and became part of the University of North Carolina system in 1972. More than 1,100 students from middle school through graduate school train for careers in the arts in five professional schools: Dance, Design and Production (including a Visual Arts Program), Drama, Filmmaking, and Music. UNCSA is the state’s only public arts conservatory, dedicated entirely to the professional training of talented students in the performing, visual and moving image arts. UNCSA is located at 1533 S. Main St., Winston-Salem. For more information, visit www.uncsa.edu.