Meet the Conductor

Elizabeth Schulze

Praised by critics as "an ideal music director whose infectious energy is as contagious as her exuberant and thoroughly committed musicianship," Elizabeth Schulze is currently the Music Director and Conductor of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra. She is the Artistic Director of the Flagstaff Symphony and the Principal Guest Conductor of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic.

Ms. Schulze has held the positions of Associate Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., Music Director and Conductor of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra in Iowa, and, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Assistant Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. Ms. Schulze also served as Music Director and Conductor of the Kenosha Symphony Orchestra in Wisconsin for seven seasons. In recent seasons, she has also been a conducting assistant and cover conductor for the New York Philharmonic.

Ms. Schulze has performed as guest conductor with numerous American orchestras and opera companies, including the Milwaukee, Colorado, North Carolina, New Haven, Madison, Eugene, Annapolis, Greenville, Omaha, Oregon, Stamford, Eastern Connecticut, Anchorage and National Symphonies, the American Composer’s Orchestra, Buffalo and Tulsa Philharmonics, Chicago Sinfonietta, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Women's Philharmonic, Chicago Civic Orchestra, the Tulsa Opera Company and the Colorado Opera Troupe. In 1996 she made her European debut leading the Mainz Chamber Orchestra for the opening concert of the Atlantisches Festival in Kaiserslautern, Germany. She appeared in Paris, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Vienna with the National Symphony during its 1997 European Tour. She has performed as guest conductor at the Aspen Music Festival where she served as Assistant Conductor. Ms. Schulze has also been a guest assistant conductor at the Paris Opera (Bastille) and at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Recent guest appearances include debuts with the Detroit, San Francisco, and New Jersey Symphonies as well as two appearances with the Jerusalem Symphony in concerts in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

A strong advocate of music education, Ms. Schulze has led the American Composer's Orchestra in several educational and family concerts in Carnegie Hall and throughout the five boroughs of New York City. While in Iowa, her innovative approach to educational programming led to interactive broadcasts of educational concerts to classrooms throughout the state over the fiber-optic network. She has performed as an artist-in-residence at Northwestern University, and has been a frequent guest conductor of the orchestras of The University of Maryland, the Manhattan School of Music, and recently, The Catholic University of America.
This season Schulze returns for a eighth year to conduct the All County High School Orchestra of Washington County. She has taught at the National Conducting Institute sponsored by the National Symphony and the Kennedy Center for six years, and she has also once again been engaged to teach and conduct at the NSO/Kennedy Center’s Summer Music Institute for gifted youth, a position she has held for nine summers.

Ms. Schulze was the recipient of the first Aspen Music School Conducting Award in 1991. An honors graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Bryn Mawr College, where she earned an A.B. cum laude in Philosophy, she holds graduate degrees in Orchestral and Choral Conducting from SUNY at Stony Brook. The first doctoral fellow in Orchestral Conducting at Northwestern University, working with Victor Yampolsky, she has been a Conducting Fellow at Les Écoles d'Art Americaines in France as well as at prestigious music festivals in America. At Aspen, she worked with Murry Sidlin, Lawrence Foster and Sergiu Commissiona. As a Tanglewood Fellow, she worked with Seiji Ozawa, Gustav Meier and Leonard Bernstein.

Updated 4/29/09