UNCSA Symphony Orchestra to perform on North Carolina tour

Sarah Mahler Kraaz 
Sarah Mahler Kraaz is professor of music, college organist, and chair of the Music Department at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisc.  She teaches piano, organ, and harpsichord, counterpoint, and music history classes including women in music and American music. Recently Kraaz has developed broadly-based courses of an interdisciplinary nature, including "popular twentieth-century American music" and "music and war" as part of her continuing interest in teaching the liberal arts.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from Olivet College and M.M. and D.M.A. degrees in music history and organ performance from the University of Colorado and the University of Kansas, respectively. An experienced teacher on piano, organ, and harpsichord, she delights in researching and performing Baroque and contemporary organ works, especially those by lesser-known composers. Her concert programs transcend the boundaries of time and nationality to present musical insights and commonalities that might not be readily apparent.

In July 2002 Kraaz appeared as a guest recitalist at the XVI Festival Internazionale Storici Organi della Valsesia in Campertogno (Piedmont), Italy, the only North American to do so. Since then, she has played recitals in California, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Edinburgh, Scotland.

 In January 2008, she was selected as one of six recording artists by the National UCC Worship & Education Ministry to record the entire New Century Hymnal on a CD set as a resource for parish churches. A featured artist (organ) with the Pine Mountain Music Festival in June 2008, she presented three recitals and a workshop on pedaling technique in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Most recently, she was a featured artist at Brevard College, where she played a recital on the 2008 Jaeckel organ at the Porter Arts Center.

Kraaz has devoted much of her personal research to examining the connection between Renaissance and Baroque organs and music written for each. Thanks to various grants, she has taken a series of trips to Europe to study and play historic organs in Germany (the 1687 Schnitger organ at the church of St. Peter and Paul in Cappel), Scotland (organs, harpsichords and clavichords in the Russell Collection), and Italy. A recent sabbatical study took her to Tuscany, where she performed a recital on the 1793 Tronci organ at the Cathedral of San Zeno in Pistoia as part of the Giuseppe Gherardeschi Organ Academy Vespers series. Her resulting article, discussing Gherardeschi’s music and the 18th-century Pistoian organ, appeared in the November 2011 issue of The Diapason. Kraaz continued her research on Tuscan organs in the fall of 2012 while teaching as a visiting scholar on the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) Arts of Florence program.

In an extension of her professional practice and research, Kraaz has composed a number of works for organ and choir. Her settings of Scottish folksongs and sea chanteys have been published by Alliance Publications of Fish Creek, Wisc. Her most recent anthem, The Bitter Winter, with text by Ralph Freeman of Neenah, Wisc., was premiered by the Ripon College Choral Union in April 2008.

Christopher James Lees
Christopher James Lees is the music director of the Symphony Orchestra and associate professor of conducting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He is an emerging young conductor becoming increasingly recognized for his powerful and nuanced performances across a wide array of repertoire.

Only the second American recipient of a Gustavo Dudamel Conducting Fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lees made his debut with the orchestra in April 2013.

Recent and upcoming guest conducting engagements include performances with the Detroit, Milwaukee, Toledo, Portland (Maine), Flint, and Kalamazoo symphonies, as well as with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestra de Chambre de Paris, Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and at the Music in the Mountains Festival & Festival Internacional de Inverno de Campos do Jordão in Brazil, among others.

After two summers of study with Robert Spano at the Aspen Music Festival, Lees was named winner of both the 2011 James Conlon Conducting Prize and the 2012 Aspen Conducting Prizes, respectively. In 2013, Mr. Lees returned for a third summer as assistant conductor for the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Lees received a prestigious Career Assistance Grant from the Solti Foundation US and was previously showcased as one of six conductors selected for the 2011 Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation National Conductor Preview, hosted by the League of American Orchestras and Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. He has additionally served as an assistant conductor for multiple concert programs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City and Charlotte symphonies; and the Ulster and London Philharmonia Orchestras, for noted conductors including Gustavo Dudamel, Charles Dutoit, David Robertson, Stéphane Danève, Leonard Slatkin, Robert Spano, Nicholas McGegan, Bramwell Tovey, among others.

Equally comfortable in the opera pit, Lees has been music director or assistant conductor on a wide array of operas, including Aida, Don Giovanni, Peter Grimes, John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, Mark Adamo's Little Women, Louis Andriessen's De Materie, and Philip Glass' the CIVIL warS.

A passionate advocate for contemporary music, Lees has commissioned many new works, and collaborated closely with Pulitzer Prize-winning composers including John Adams, William Bolcom, Joseph Schwantner, and Jennifer Higdon, among others. As music director for the University of Michigan's Contemporary Directions Ensemble, he developed a reputation for pioneering the specific connections between innovative contemporary music with other specialty art forms, many in alternative spaces and formats.

Lees has previously served as associate conductor of the Akron Symphony Orchestra, where he was awarded a Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation Career Development Grant, and was also a recipient of the Zander Conducting Fellowship with the Boston Philharmonic.

A native of Washington, D.C., he holds bachelor’s and master's degrees from the University of Michigan, where he formerly served as associate director of orchestras. His primary conducting mentors are Robert Spano and Larry Rachleff. 

March 7, 2016