PAUL PHILLIPS is Professor of Music and the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies at Stanford University, where he conducts the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Philharmonia, and Stanford Summer Symphony. With a repertoire of more than 1,000 works conducted in performance, he has appeared with over 80 orchestras, opera companies, choirs, and ballet troupes worldwide, including the San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and Choir, Orquesta Sinfónica de Salta, Orquesta Filarmońica de Río Negro, Opera Boston, Commonwealth Opera, Opera Providence, and Paul Taylor Dance Company. Phillips has performed in Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall), and Symphony Hall (Boston), and conducted concerts featuring Itzhak Perlman, Christopher O'Riley, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Reich, William Bolcom, and many other renowned soloists and composers. Phillips's five discs for Naxos include recordings with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland), Slovak Philharmonic, and Brown University Orchestra; he has also recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Pioneer Valley Symphony. His conducting honors include 11 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, and 1st Prize in the NOS International Conductors Course (Holland) and Wiener Meisterkurse Conductors Course (Vienna).

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Also an award-winning composer and pianist, Phillips has composed orchestral works, ballet, opera, choral music, song cycles, keyboard and chamber music, music for theatre, and works for young audiences. His most recent composition is Sweet Thunder for 12 Pianos, a commission from Sunset Piano that premiered at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral in February 2024. His chamber arrangement of Stravinsky’s opera Mavra, published by Boosey & Hawkes, has been performed by the Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne and is featured in Bayerische Staatsoper's Mavra/Iolanta, a DVD/Blu-ray disc cited in 2023 by Opera News as a “Critic’s Choice”.

 

Phillips is the author of A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, a groundbreaking examination of the work of the British composer-novelist best known as the author of A Clockwork Orange, and editor of The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993, a collection of 75 writings by Anthony Burgess published in 2024 by Carcanet. The Financial Times named The Devil Prefers Mozart one of its three Best Summer Books of 2024 in Classical Music and music critic Richard Bratby chose it as his Book of the Year. Phillips has also contributed essays to six other books about Burgess, including the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange, and as a music theorist is best known for his article “The Enigma of Variations: A Study of Stravinsky’s Final Work for Orchestra” in Music Analysis, which is cited by Richard Taruskin in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions as “the best exposition in print of Stravinsky’s serial methods.”
 

Following studies at Eastman, Columbia, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Phillips began his career as Conducting Assistant to Michael Gielen at the Frankfurt Opera and 1st Kapellmeister at Stadttheater Lüneburg. As a student at Aspen, Tanglewood, Salzburg Mozarteum, LA Philharmonic Institute, Music Academy of the West, and other festivals in the U.S. and Europe, Phillips studied conducting with Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa, Gunther Schuller, Michael Tilson Thomas, Leonard Bernstein, and other celebrated maestros. Upon his selection for the Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductors Program after two years in Germany, Phillips returned to the U.S., where he held positions with the Greensboro Symphony, Greensboro Opera, Maryland Symphony, Savannah Symphony, Savannah Symphony Chorale, and numerous other musical organizations.

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Prior to his appointment at Stanford, Phillips was Director of Orchestras and Chamber Music at Brown University, where he received the Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning. During his years in New England, he served as Associate Conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic and Music Director/Conductor of the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in western Massachusetts. Phillips served from 2022-2024 as President of the Western Region of CODA (College Orchestra Directors Association), is in his tenth year as Music Advisor and an Honorary Patron of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and returns this summer to the Montecito International Music Festival for the third time to conduct the Montecito Festival Orchestra.