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Biography
Steven Fox is an American conductor of classical music. Currently Steven Fox is the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of New York’s Clarion Music Society and Founder of Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg in Russia.
Biography
Fox began studying music at the Horace Mann School under pianist John Contiguglia and conductor and composer Johannes Somary.He went on to study Music and Russian at Dartmouth College, graduating as a Senior Fellow with High Honors, and continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he received an MMus degree with Distinction along with three of the institution's awards: the Sir Thomas Armstrong Prize, the Peter Le Huray Award and the Alan Kirby Prize.
Career
Shortly after his graduation from RAM, Fox traveled to Russia and founded the country's first period-instrument orchestra, Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg. With Musica Antiqua, he revived a lost repertoire of Russian 18th-century music from the court of Catherine the Great.The list of works he has premiered from this period includes the earliest symphony by a Ukrainian composer—Symphony in C by Maksym Berezovsky (c. 1770), which he has conducted in London, St. Petersburg and New York – and a Russian composer Dmitri Bortniansky's final opera, Le fils rival, which he conducted in the Hermitage Theater in 2004.
Fox has appeared as a guest conductor with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Francisco, the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, Juilliard415 at Lincoln Center, the Charleston Symphony Orchestra and the Quebec Symphony Orchestra. From 2008 to 2013, he was an Associate Conductor at the New York City Opera, and he has also served as Assistant Conductor for the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Program and Juilliard Opera. Other recent guest conducting engagements have included Handel's Judas Maccabaeus in Vilnius, Lithuania, with Jauna Muzika; and Mozart’s Sparrow Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. He has given master classes in Historical Performance at Yale University and Dartmouth College, and in early oratorio at The Juilliard School.
In 2006, Fox became the Artistic Director of the Clarion Music Society and founded the Clarion Choir. Over his tenure, the group has expanded its repertoire from Salamone Rossi to Aaron Copland. He has led the Clarion Society in highly acclaimed performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and Carnegie Hall. His leading the Clarion in Maximilian Steinberg's Passion Week will soon be released on CD. Fox is also the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of New Jersey's Pro Arte Chorale.
In the 2015-2016 season, Fox will lead the Clarion Society in numerous concert appearances in New York City. He is also conducting a new production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at l'Opera de Québec.