Over five decades, John Mauceri’s extraordinary career has brought him not only to the world’s greatest opera companies and symphony orchestras, but also to the musical stages of Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the most prestigious halls of academia. Regarded as the world’s leading performer of the music of Hollywood’s émigré composers, he has taken the lead in the preservation and performance of many kinds of music and has supervised/conducted premieres by composers as diverse as Debussy, Stockhausen, Korngold, Bernstein, Hindemith, Elfman, Ives, and Shore. As an accomplished recording artist, John Mauceri has over 70 albums to his name, and is the recipient of Grammy, Tony, Olivier, Drama Desk, Edison, Cannes Classique, Billboard, two Diapasons d’Or, three Emmys, and four Deutsche Schallplatten Awards.

Have you every wondered what, exactly, a conductor does? Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting delves inside the enigmatic art and craft of conducting for a popular audience.  With candor and humor, John Mauceri shows how conducting itself is a composition, of legacy and tradition, techniques handed down from master to apprentice, and more than a trace of ineffable magic.  

Mauceri reveals how conductors approach a piece of music; what it takes to communicate solely through gesture, with sometimes hundreds of performers at once; and the occasionally glamorous, often challenging life of the itinerant maestro.  Mauceri, who worked closely with Leonard Bernstein for eighteen years, studied with Leopold Stokowski, and was on the faculty of Yale University for fifteen years, is the perfect guide to the allure and theater, passion and drudgery, rivalries and relationships of the conducting life.

Michael Abels is a composer whose concert works like “Delights & Dances” have been commissioned and performed by orchestras throughout the US. Recently his music was introduced to a much larger audience when he was tapped by filmmaker Jordan Peele to compose the score for Peele’s smash directorial debut “Get Out.” His piano tribute to Leonard Bernstein, “Iconoclasm,” is included on Lara Downes latest album “For Lenny” on the Sony Classical label in February 2018. Abels is the Music Director at New Roads School in Santa Monica, home of the Anne & Jerry Moss Theater.