Sarah Hicks

Noted in the New York Times as part of "a new wave of female conductors in their late 20's through early 40's", Sarah Hicks's versatile and vibrant musicianship has secured her place in "the next generation of up-and-coming American conductors". In October of 2009 she was named Principal Conductor, Pops and Presentations of the Minnesota Orchestra; in addition to conducting most Pops and Special Presentations, she will be instrumental in creating new Pops productions while also heading the innovative… Show more classical series, "Inside the Classics". Hicks concurrently holds the positions of both Associate Conductor of the North Carolina Symphony and Staff Conductor of the Curtis Institute of Music. Throughout her career she has collaborated with diverse artists, from Jamie Laredo and Hilary Hahn to Ben Folds and Chris Botti.


Ms. Hicks has guest conducted extensively both in the States and abroad, including the Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Columbus Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Detroit Symphony, National Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Prime Philharmonic (Seoul, Korea), Chattanooga Symphony and the Charleston Symphony. Upcoming appearances include a debut with the Florida Symphony as well as return engagements with the San Francisco Symphony.


Ms. Hicks's past positions include Associate Conductor of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, Resident Conductor of the Florida Philharmonic, Assistant Conductor of the Reading Symphony and Assistant Conductor of the Philadelphia Singers, the chorus of the Philadelphia Orchestra, whom she has led in radio broadcasts heard nationwide. She has also been Music Director of the Hawaii Summer Symphony, an ensemble she founded in 1991 in her hometown of Honolulu and which she led for five seasons.


Ms. Hicks was invited to Japan by the New National Theatre Tokyo, where she acted as assistant conductor to a production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte and has performed Verdi's Aïda with the East Slovak State Opera Theater. Her extensive work with the Curtis Opera Studio include performances of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites and numerous vocal concerts; she led the Opera Studio's production of Handel's Alcina in 2005 and led the Minnesota Orchestra in a semi-staged production of Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel in 2009.


A committed proponent of the performance of new music, Ms. Hicks regularly leads the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in readings, recordings and performances of contemporary works. In addition to premiering works by young composers from both the Curtis Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, she has collaborated with Ned Rorem and Jennifer Higdon. She has recently completed a recording project with the Vermont Symphony featuring music of Richard Danielpour and David Ludwig with Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson, soloists. She has also conducted performances with Composers in the Shape of a Pear (Cleveland) and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.


The 2010-11 season marks the beginning of an innovative project conceived by Ms. Hicks; the Musical Microcommission Project, in conjunction with the "Inside the Classics" series of the Minnesota Orchestra, is an initiative to bring a major new work to the stage of Orhestra Hall with funding via hundreds of "micro" donations from music lovers across Minnesota and beyond.


Ms. hicks was a member of the Faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music from 2000-2005 and continues her affiliation with Curtis as Staff Conductor. She has prepared the Symphony Orchestra of the Curtis Institute for readings and concerts with leading conductors including Wolfgang Sawallisch and Sir Simon Rattle. Her work with the Curtis Symphon led to a one-season appointment as assistant conductor to the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra, and ensemble she trained intensively for Music Director James Levine, to whom she acted as assistant conductor.


Sarah Hicks was born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in Honolulu, HI. Trained on boeht the piano and viola, she was a prizewinning pianist by her early teens. She received her BA magna cum laude from Harvard University in composition; her AIDS Oratorio was premiered in May of 1993 and received a second performance at the Fogg Art Museum the following December. She holds an Artists' Degree in conducting from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with renowned pedagogue Otto-Werner Mueller. Ms. Hicks's talents have been recognized with numerous prized and scholarships; she received the Thomas Hoopes Prize for composition and the Doris Cohen Levy Prize for conducting from Harvard University, and she was the recipient of the Helen F. Whitaker Fund Scholarship and a Presser Award during her time at Curtis.


In her spare time, Ms. Hicks enjoys running, yoga, her German Shepherd, cooking (and eating) with her husband, French hornist Paul LaFollette, blogging, snowshoeing and songwriting.










Minnesota Orchestra
The Minnesota Orchestra, now in its second century and led by Music Director Osmo Vänskä, ranks among America’s top symphonic ensembles, with a distinguished history of acclaimed performances in its home state and around the world; award-winning recordings, radio broadcasts and educational outreach programs; and a visionary commitment to building the orchestral repertoire of tomorrow.

Founded as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble gave its inaugural performance on November 5, 1903, shortly after baseball’s first World Series and exactly six weeks before the Wright brothers made their unprecedented airplane flight. The Orchestra played its first regional tour in 1907 and made its New York City debut in 1912 at Carnegie Hall, where it has performed regularly ever since. Outside the United States, the Orchestra has played concerts in Australia, Canada, Europe, the Far East, Latin America and the Middle East. Since 1968 it has been known as the Minnesota Orchestra.

The 98-member ensemble now presents nearly 200 programs each year, primarily at its home venue of Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis, and its concerts are heard by live audiences of 400,000 annually. Its Friday night performances are broadcast live regionally by Minnesota Public Radio, and many programs are subsequently featured on American Public Media’s national programs, SymphonyCast and Performance Today.

In the early 1920s, the Minnesota Orchestra became one of the first ensembles to be heard on recordings, as well as on the radio—in 1923 it played a nationally broadcast concert under guest conductor Bruno Walter—and it has been recording and broadcasting ever since. Its landmark Mercury Living Presence LP recordings of the 1950s and 1960s, under music directors Antal Dorati and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, have been reissued on compact disc to great acclaim.

Under Music Director Osmo Vänskä, the Orchestra has completed a five-year, five-disc initiative to record the complete Beethoven symphonies on the BIS label. The collection has amassed rave reviews, with The New York Times writing that it “may be the definitive [cycle] of our time” and the Financial Times of London praising it as the “modern Beethoven recording par excellence.” The Orchestra’s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth received a 2008 Grammy nomination for “Best Orchestral Performance,” and the CD featuring the Second and Seventh Symphonies was nominated for a 2009 Classic FM Gramophone Award. In 2009 BIS released its newest collaboration with the Orchestra, the premiere recording of To Be Certain of the Dawn, a Holocaust memorial oratorio by Stephen Paulus on a libretto by Michael Dennis Browne.

Vänskä and the Orchestra have recently embarked on a series of new recording initiatives, include a five-year project with BIS to record all five Beethoven piano concertos with Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin and, for the Hyperion label, live in-concert recordings of Tchaikovsky’s three piano concertos and Concert Fantasia, recorded over two seasons with British pianist Stephen Hough.

In addition to traditional concerts, the Minnesota Orchestra connects with more than 85,000 music lovers annually through educational programs including Young People’s Concerts (YPs) and Target Free Family Concerts. In the last decade more than half a million students have experienced a Minnesota Orchestra YP. Musicians also engage in such Orchestra-sponsored initiatives as the Adopt-A-School program, Side-by-Side rehearsals and concerts with young area musicians, and the UPbeat program, which establishes multi-year relationships with communities throughout the Twin Cities and around the state.

The ensemble also offers numerous pops concerts, presenting the greatest contemporary pop performers in genres ranging from rock, jazz and Big Band to Latin, country and world music. In 2008, the Orchestra established Jazz at Orchestra Hall, a jazz series featuring top performers from around the nation, and named Irvin Mayfield as the series’ artistic director. American conductor Andrew Litton serves as artistic director for the Orchestra’s beloved urban summer music festival, Sommerfest, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2010.
With a long history of commissioning and performing new music, the Minnesota Orchestra continues to nourish a strong commitment to contemporary composers. Since 1903 the Orchestra has premiered and/or commissioned nearly 300 compositions, including works by John Adams, Dominick Argento (Minnesota Orchestra Composer Laureate), Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Charles Ives, Aaron Jay Kernis (Director of the Orchestra’s Composer Institute), Libby Larsen, Stephen Paulus, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (Orchestra Conductor Laureate) and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. In addition, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has bestowed upon the Orchestra 18 awards for adventuresome programming, including Leonard Bernstein Awards for Education Programming in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and, in 2008, the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music.

The Orchestra welcomed Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä as its tenth music director in the fall of 2003. Praised for his intense and dynamic performances, Vänskä is recognized for compelling interpretations of the standard, contemporary and Nordic repertoires. During his tenure, he has drawn extraordinary reviews for concerts both at home and abroad, including appearances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, three European tours—the most recent in February and March 2009—and Minnesota tours in 2005, 2007 and 2008. Vänskä has extended his tenure with the Minnesota Orchestra through 2015. ~www.sarahhicksconductor.com

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