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Brett Mitchell

April 24, 2010 | 8:00 PM

The evening begins in the modern era, as Conductor Brett Mitchell opens with Michael Torke’s soaring, joyful Javelin, a piece commissioned for the 1994 Olympics. We move slightly back in time for Prokofiev’s vivacious Piano Concerto No. 3 — perhaps the best-loved of his piano compositions. And the evening comes to a glorious conclusion with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, which the master himself proclaimed to be “one of my best works.”

BRETT MITCHELL, GUEST CONDUCTOR

Brett Mitchell has been described as a “bright young hope for classical music’s future” and a director who conducts with “infectious enthusiasm and evident joy.” As an Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony, Mitchell leads the orchestra in several dozen classical, education, family and gala concerts each season. Since 2006, he has also been Assistant Conductor of the Orchestre National de France. No stranger to Illinois, he was the Director of Orchestras at Northern Illinois University from 2005 to 2007. Awarded an inaugural American Friends of the Mendelssohn Foundations Scholarship, Mitchell is involved with intensive, one-on-one study with Kurt Masur, assisting the maestro with concerts in Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and with the New York Philharmonic. He was the youngest of 10 semifinalists from a pool of over 500 applicants in the Third International Conductors’ Competition Sir Georg Solti in 2006.

GLEB IVANOV, PIANO SOLOIST

From recitals at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to his most recent American tour, Russian pianist Gleb Ivanov routinely earns high praise. Born in Moscow to a family of musicians, he began accompanying his father at the age of eight. Also adept with the clarinet and the accordion, he was mentored by the famed Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich.

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