Music Director John Morris Russell
Maestro John Morris Russell has consistently won international praise for his extraordinary music-making and visionary leadership. On December 6, 2010 he was named Conductor Designate of The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, one of the most celebrated musical ensembles of our times. In September of 2011, he begins his full-time tenure with the POPS leading performances at Cincinnati’s Music Hall and the Riverbend Music Center.
Currently in his 11th year as Music Director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Russell has fostered a decade of unprecedented artistic growth and has invigorated the musical life of the Windsor-Essex region. A two-time recipient of Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor’s Award for the Arts, as well as the Ontario Arts Council’s Vida Peene Award for Artistic Excellence, Maestro Russell and the WSO have also won coveted nominations for both the Gemini Awards (2004) and Juno Awards (2008). In 2010 Mr. Russell received the prestigious The Herb Gray Harmony Award by the Multicultural Council of Windsor and Essex County, in recognition of the WSO’s programming and outreach activities that consistently support and celebrate the region’s diversity, as well as Mr. Russell’s innovative strategies to encourage a harmonious society. In October of 2010 he became the first recipient of the Arts Leadership Award by the Windsor Endowment for the Arts, in recognition of the enormous contribution he has made to the region’s cultural life. Maestro Russell was awarded a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa by the University of Windsor in June of 2011.
The WSO has made seventeen national broadcasts on CBC Radio 2 with Maestro Russell, including concerts from the Masterworks and Intimate Classics series, and the annual Windsor Canadian Music Festival. The most recent CBC broadcast recording of Aurora Borealis by Jordon Nobles, was selected to represent Canada in the 57th annual International Rostrum of Composers in Lisbon, Portugal in June of 2010. The WSO’s first nationally televised production was created with Mr. Russell for the CBC Television series Opening Night, which subsequently won the Gold Worldmedal for “Best Performance Program” at the New York Festivals Awards for Television and New Media, as well as a Gemini Award Nomination. In 2006 the Windsor Symphony Orchestra released Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf narrated by the internationally acclaimed actor, Colm Feore, and Last Minute Lulu, composed by WSO Composer-in-Residence, Brent Lee, with text by the Newbery Medal winning author, Christopher Paul Curtis. The recording won the WSO its first Juno nomination for Best Children’s Album in 2008.
As a guest conductor, Maestro Russell has led many of North America’s most distinguished ensembles, including the orchestras of Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Kitchener-Waterloo, Orchestra London, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Dallas, Louisville, Miami’s New World Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Colorado Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, New York Pops, New York City Ballet, as well as The Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In February of 2011, Maestro Russell was named Principal Guest Conductor of the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
Maestro Russell is widely considered North America’s leader in orchestral educational programming. In Windsor, he crafted two new concert series, Peanut Butter n’ Jam and Family Jamboree, specifically for youngsters and families, and spearheaded the creation of The Windsor-Essex Youth Choir and the Windsor Symphony Youth Orchestra. Mr. Russell’s passionate support of music in the schools has forged performance partnerships with the University of Windsor School of Music, the Windsor Centre for the Creative Arts and dozens of choral, dance and performing ensembles throughout the community. With the creation of the One Community—One Symphony project in 2008, Maestro Russell has worked with over a thousand teenagers in 15 school band and choral programs, representing French, Catholic and Public School Boards, in rehearsals and performances with the WSO. In the last decade, the WSO’s enormously successful education concerts have engaged over 100,000 students and teachers in Essex, Lambton and Kent counties.
As one of the nation’s strongest advocates for new music, Maestro Russell has helped nurture many new voices in Canadian music, conducting numerous Windsor premiers of important Canadian works and over 45 world premiers of commissioned compositions. Mr. Russell created the WSO’s first multi-year composer-in-residence position, and is deeply involved in the production of the annual Windsor Canadian Music Festival, described by CBC producer David Jaeger as, “one of the most exciting and innovative developments to appear lately in the Canadian musical scene.”
Mr. Russell served as associate conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for eleven years where he regularly led concerts at Music Hall and the Riverbend Music Center. In September of 1999, Mr. Russell replaced Erich Kunzel with an hour’s notice to conduct the Pops’ opening weekend concerts. The following week he substituted for Maestro Kunzel in concerts on the stage of the famed Musikverein in Vienna, featuring the Harlem Boychoir, the Vienna Choir Boys and actor Gregory Peck. The performance continues to be televised throughout Europe, Japan and in the USA on PBS.
Maestro Russell has also served as associate conductor of the Savannah Symphony Orchestra, director of the orchestral program at Vanderbilt University, and music director with the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He received a Master of Music degree in conducting from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from Williams College in Massachusetts. He has also studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, and the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Hancock, Maine.
