POPS Conductors
Nathaniel Fox Beversluis | Victor Vanacore | Dmitry Sitkovetsky
Nathaniel Fox Beversluis
Nathaniel Beversluis is currently the Assistant Conductor of the Greensboro Symphony and the Music Director of the Greensboro Symphony Youth Orchestra. A native of Indianapolis, Nathaniel began writing music and playing piano and violin at a young age. He refused to practice Hanon exercises, hymns, or anything by Edward MacDowell. Confounding one piano teacher after another, he began learning music by reading and playing from scores, listening to records, composing, and staying hours after school to extract wisdom from his school orchestra conductor, Dick Dennis.
He holds a Bachelor of Music from the Indiana University School of Music and Masters of Music in Orchestral Conducting from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. He studied conducting with Mark Gibson, Xian Zhang and Roger Grodsky, and served as pianist and Associate Conductor for CCM Musical Theater. He has worked for the Opera Theater and Music Festival of Lucca (Lucca, Italy), University of Central Florida Conservatory Theatre (Orlando and Daytona Beach, FL), Seaside Music Theater(Daytona Beach, FL), and Tri-Cities Opera (Binghamton, NY).
He received two composition fellowships to the Henry Mancini Institute in Los Angeles and recently conducted the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra (Hilversum, NL) on a radio broadcast as part of a conductor's workshop. He has studied piano with Phil DeGreg, Lynne Arriale, Mike Lucas and Luke Gillespie, and his compositions have won awards from ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.). His interests as a composer involve combining the traditions and approaches of classical with jazz musicians.
Since August 2009 Nathaniel has been Music Director for the Music Theatre program and Performing Arts Department at Elon University.
Victore Vanacore
Grammy Award Winner Victor Vanacore has been at the nexus of popular music for the past 25 years. In 1974, Vanacore moved to Los Angeles where he joined the Jackson Five as a keyboardist and musical arranger. A year later the band's conductor had an emergency; Vanacore was asked to fill in, and after his performance that night, he became the Jackson's permanent conductor and arranger.
Vanacore's star rose, and after the end of the Jackson Five tour, he signed with the Fifth Dimension, serving as conductor and arranger for two years. Johnny Mathis then heard of Vanacore's talent, and hired him away as the Musical Director for his world tour. This musical relationship lasted for two years. He then joined Barry Manilow for six years in the same capacity, and received six album credits, including "If I Should Love Again," "Barry Live in Britain," "Barry," and "The Greatest Hits."
Victor Vanacore valued a close ongoing relationship with the musical icon Ray Charles, whom he met in 1990, until Charles’ passing in 2004. Vanacore served as Musical Director, Arranger, and Opening Act for Mr. Charles. Ray Charles’ only platinum CD entitled, “ Genius Loves Company” features Victor Vanacore’s 80 piece Grammy Award winning orchestral arrangements.
In addition to his musical associations with Celebrity vocalists, Vanacore enjoys a career as a Pops Conductor with symphony orchestras worldwide. His recent appearance as conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl garnered broad critical acclaim.
Recently, Victor has been working as a composer in conjunction with his brother David on the critically acclaimed hit CBS show “Survivor.” He composed music for Donald Trump's "The Apprentice," American Idol and the 2005 Academy Awards. In 2007, at the request of Placido Domingo, Vanacore composed original neoclassical music based on the texts of Pope John Paul II.
Recent symphonic commissions by Vanacore include “Detroit Soul” commissioned by the Detroit Symphony featuring Motown themes and “America Then And Now” for New Jersey Public Television Network and "Spain Meets Birdland" for the Berklee College of Music 60th anniversary.
Dmitry Sitkovetsky
Dmitry Sitkovetsky is the music director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and this is Maestro Sitkovetsky's first ever POPS concert in Greensboro. He is an artist whose creativity defies categorizing. He has built up an active and successful career as a violinist, conductor, arranger, chamber musician and festival director. Sitkovetsky has performed as soloist with a number of the world’s leading orchestras including the Berlin, New York and LA Philharmonic Orchestras, Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Philharmonia, London Symphony, NHK, Chicago, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras. He has performed at a number of high-profile festivals including Salzburg, Lucerne, Edinburgh and Verbier.
Sitkovetsky has built a flourishing career as a conductor. He was appointed Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Ulster Orchestra (1996-2001) and subsequently made Conductor Laureate, and was Principal Guest Conductor of the Russian State Orchestra (2002-2005). In 2003, Sitkovetsky was appointed Music Director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and, in 2006, named Artist-in-Residence of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y Leon (Spain), positions he still holds. As a guest conductor, he has worked with the London & Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, San Francisco, Seattle and Dallas Symphony Orchestras, Santa Cecilia, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris & St Petersburg Philharmonic.
Sitkovetsky is also the founding director of the New European Strings Chamber Orchestra (NES CO) which is comprised of distinguished string players from Eastern and Western Europe. Since his successful transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string trio, he has transcribed more than 30 works and his transcriptions are published by Doblinger, Sikorski and Schirmer.
Between 1983 and 2002 Sitkovetsky was the Artistic Director of a number of music festivals including the Korsholm Music Festival, Finland, Seattle International Music Festival, ¨The Silk Route of Music¨ Festival in Baku, Azerbaijan, and in May 2007, was the Artist-in-Residence at the Bodensee Festival in Germany. He has an active and varied recording career with an extensive discography which includes all the major violin concerti, numerous chamber music works as well as orchestral recordings that he’s conducted. His most recent release is of Dutilleux’s L'Arbre des Songes (Violin Concerto) with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Mariss Janssons. Sitkovetsky’s increasing involvement in contemporary music shows a keen interest in performing new repertoire. He premiered the violin concerti written for him by John Casken (1995) and Krzystof Meyer (2000) and often performs works by Dutilleux, Penderecki, Schnittke, Pärt and Shchedrin.
Recent/future engagements include conducting the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, Orchestre National de Lille, Tonkünstler Orchestra, New Zealand, Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, Macau Symphony as well as the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra in Italy and on tour in South America. Concerto engagements included the Concertgebouw, Vienna Symphony, Cincinnati Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Hamburg Philharmonic, Tenerife Symphony and recitals in Seattle (with Bella Davidovich), Brussels, Seville, Cape Town (with Konstantin Lifschitz), London (Wigmore Hall: Rostropovich tribute Play/directing engagements included the Komische Oper Berlin orchestra, return invitations to the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris and Orchestre National de Lille as well as the St Petersburg Philharmonic. Since 1987 he has resided in London with his wife, Susan, and their daughter, Julia.