Listen to the Middleton Community Orchestra Winter Young Artists Concert from 7:30 – 9 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 19, at the Middleton Performing Arts Center.

Winners of the MCO Young Artist Competition
Alexander Platt, guest conductor

Recently honored by the Illinois Council of Orchestras, Alexander Platt has built a unique career spanning the worlds of symphony, chamber music, and opera. Alexander Platt is Music Director of the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra, the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra, and the Wisconsin Philharmonic, and spends his summers as the Music Director of the Maverick Concerts in Woodstock, New York, the oldest summer chamber-music festival in America.

Previously he spent twelve seasons as Resident Conductor and Music Advisor at Chicago Opera Theater, where he led the Chicago premieres of such landmark 20th-century operas as Britten’s Death In Venice, John Adams’ Nixon in China, Shostakovich’s Moscow Paradise, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Carmen, the Tony Kushner/Maurice Sendak Brundibar, the first full staging of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and the world-premiere recording of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik — all to high acclaim in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, Opera Canada, and both the Chicago papers.

The former chief conductor of the Racine (Wisconsin) Symphony, the Boca Raton Symphonia, and the Marion (Indiana) Philharmonic, Platt began his career as the Apprentice Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Minnesota Opera, where he earned universal acclaim for his conducting of Colin Graham’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

A graduate of Yale College, King’s College Cambridge (where he was a British Marshall Scholar) and conducting fellowships at both Aspen and Tanglewood, he has guest-conducted the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Illinois Philharmonic, the Freiburg Philharmonic in Germany, the Aalborg Symphony in Denmark, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia, Camerata Chicago, the Banff Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, and the Houston, Charlotte, Columbus, and Indianapolis Symphonies.

In 2013 he made his debut at the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to high praise in the Chicago Tribune.  Platt has recorded for Minnesota Public Radio, National Public Radio, the South-West German Radio and the BBC, and his Cedille Records disc with Rachel Barton Pine of Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is still often heard on radio stations throughout the world.