American Philharmonic
Sonoma County
Music Director Finalists
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Tristan Arnold - Oct 9th, 2011
Tristan Arnold teaches and performs music throughout the Bay Area, from classical to country. Growing up in Petaluma, he first studied violin, then trombone and finally double bass through the Santa Rosa Symphony's education department. After graduating in 2006 from Northwestern University with a major in music education and a minor in music criticism, Mr. Arnold returned to the Bay Area to teach music at Davidson Middle School in San Rafael.
He left that position to pursue a master's degree at San Francisco State University under Cyrus Ginwala. At SFSU, he has conducted the University's Orchestra and Opera Orchestra. He serves as music director of the San Francisco State University Wind Ensemble. He also directs the Santa Rosa Symphony's Preparatory Orchestra for young musicians and has written reviews for Music Educators Journal and Strings Magazine. Mr. Arnold currently teaches music at Lincoln High School in San Francisco.
Mr.Arnold is a member of the American Philharmonic - Sonoma County, serving most recently as principal bassist on the orchestra's tour of China. In addition to APSC, he performs frequently with San Francisco-based songwriter Mark David Ashworth and the Petaluma-based acoustic quartet, The Pine Needles.
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Barnaby Palmer - Nov 20th, 2011
Born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Barnaby Palmer attended Interlochen Arts Academy, Cleveland Institute of Music and the University of Michigan. He has studied conducting with Alan Gilbert, Rossen Milanov, Larry Rachleff and Michael Morgan.
Mr. Palmer has received critical acclaim both as an orchestral and operatic conductor. In 2011, he was named assistant conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and
will participate in this capacity during their seven city European tour. Also in 2011, he conducted the world premiere of Casanova by Richard Evans in a Bay Area performance. In 2012 he
will conduct the world premiere of the opera Machine, by Clark Suprynowicz, at The Crucible, an arts center in Oakland.
Since 2002, Palmer has been artistic director of the San Francisco Lyric Opera, where he has conducted over 35 new productions. Reviewing a San Francisco Lyric Opera performance of Un Ballo in Maschera, San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman wrote, "the evening's hero was Palmer himself, shaping the performance with fluency and authority, and eliciting splendid playing from the orchestra. The first sign of things to come, in fact, was the superb rendition of the Act I prelude, done with a robustness and clarity that most ensembles could only envy."
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Evan Craves - Feb 5th, 2012
By day, Evan Craves is a project manager for Deposition Sciences, Inc., a Santa Rosa technology company specializing in high-precision thin-film optical filters. By night, he is a freelance violinist, composer and conductor. He has worked in the Santa Rosa area since graduating from UC Davis in 1998 with bachelor degrees in both chemical engineering and music.
For five years, Mr. Craves worked with local music publisher J. B. Elkus and Son, where he prepared and typeset music for Elinor Armer, Jerome Rosen and Lou Harrison. He received a grant to research Charles Ives' Lincoln, the Great Commoner and worked on the National Ives Society's critical edition of Ives' Symphony No. 2. Mr. Craves has performed with a number of regional music groups, including the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, UC Davis Baroque Ensemble, Apollo Baroque Orchestra, Symphony of the Redwoods, Pacific Collegium and the San Francisco Lyric Opera. He is a co-founder of The String Quartet.
Mr. Craves has been a member of the American Philharmonic - Sonoma County since 2000. He has served as violinist, concertmaster, director of communications and assistant conductor. With APSC, Mr. Craves conducted an outdoor pops concert in 2005, performed the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 in 2007 and conducted a concert of featuring works by Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart in 2009. Mr. Craves studied conducting with D. Kern Holoman and Jeffrey Thomas and music composition with Andrew Frank, Pablo Ortiz and Ross Bauer. He has studied violin with Donna Lerew, Robert Bloch, Elizabeth Field, Phoebe Craig and Michael Sand.
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John Kendall Bailey - Apr 1, 2012
John Kendall Bailey is music director, principal conductor and chorus master of Trinity Lyric Opera, music director and conductor of Voices of Musica Sacra, associate conductor of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, associate conductor of Oakland Youth Orchestra and artistic director of the San Francisco Song Festival.
In 1994, Mr. Bailey founded the Berkeley Lyric Opera and served as its music director and conductor until 2001. Since then he has been a guest conductor with many local ensembles, including the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the Diablo Symphony Orchestra, the Oakland Ballet and Pocket Opera. As a choral director, Mr. Bailey served as chorus master of the Festival Opera of Walnut Creek from 2002-2006 and Opera San Jose in 2009. He has been a guest conductor for the University of California-Berkeley Chamber Chorus, the University of California-Davis Chorus, Chamber Singers, and Alumni Chorus, and the Berkeley Broadway Singers.
Mr. Bailey is also a composer, whose works have been performed and commissioned in the Bay Area and abroad. A baritone, oboist, and pianist, he has also performed widely, including appearances with the San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Oakland East Bay, Berkeley, Redding, Napa, Sacramento, and Prometheus symphonies, American Bach Soloists, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the San Francisco Bach Choir, Coro Hispano de San Francisco and Pacific Mozart Ensemble. He has recorded for the Harmonia Mundi, Koch International, Pro Musica, Wildboar, Centaur and Angelus Music labels. Mr. Bailey has taught conducting at the University of California at Davis and Notre Dame de Namur University.
Mr. Bailey will be making his fifth appearance as guest conductor with the American Philharmonic-Sonoma County. Previous performances have included a Valentine's Day program, the world premiere of Maestro Sakakeeny's composition The Lion and the Rose, an all-Russian program and a recent all-American program which included the West Coast premiere of Bernard Herrmann's cantata Moby Dick, the first performances since its 1940 New York Philharmonic premiere.
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Norman Gamboa - May 6, 2012
Born and raised in Costa Rica, Norman Gamboa is Music Director of the Powder River Symphony Orchestra in Wyoming and Artistic Advisor to the Collegium Musicum in Santiago, Chile. He has served as Associate Conductor of the Las Vegas Music Festival, Assistant Conductor of the Waco Symphony and Music Director of the Waco Symphony Youth Orchestra.
A versatile conductor, he is equally at home with opera, ballet, chamber, and symphonic orchestral repertoire. Mr. Gamboa has championed the works of up-and-coming composers, including world-premieres by Kyle Kindred, Evelyn Stroobach and Robert Bradshaw, as well as renowned living composers from Latin America and Spain such as Benjamín Gutiérrez and Eddie Mora. He has conducted a wide variety of innovative joint ventures, including a newly choreographed production of Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye with Ballet Midwest and numerous outstanding fully-staged operas with the Topeka Opera Society. Festival appearances include FOSJA-Casals Festival of Puerto Rico, Central American Festival of Chamber Music, International Music Festival of Medellín (Colombia), Villarrica Music Festival (Chile), the International Festival of Arts of Costa Rica, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, Bregenzer Festspiele (Austria), the Las Vegas Music Festival, OSESP-International Orchestra Conductors Competition, ITEC-Regina Music Festival in Canada and the New York Brass Conference.
Mr. Gamboa has appeared as guest conductor with symphonies in Texas, Kansas, Wyoming, Minnesota, Nevada and California, as well as with orchestras around the world, including the Orchestra Filarmonica di Stato Ploiesti (Romania), Západoceský Symfonický Orchestr (Czech Republic), Orquesta Filarmónica de Medellín (Colombia), and Orquesta Nacional de Nicaragua, Orquesta Sinfónica del Estado Mérida and Orquesta Sinfónica de Los Llanos (Venezuela), to name a few.