John Dodson became music director of the Adrian Symphony Orchestra in 2001. During his seven seasons with the orchestra, the Adrian Symphony Orchestra has experienced tremendous artistic development, remarkable audience growth, and sustained financial success. Dodson’s leadership in inviting soloists of an exceptionally high level, broad educational efforts, and innovative audience outreach concerts mark this period as a highpoint in the orchestra’s history. In 2007 Dodson recorded Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with violinist Janet Sung and the Adrian Symphony Orchestra. In 2008, the orchestra was one of seven nationwide selected by the League of American Orchestras for its Institutional Visions Program, a three-year intensive program devoted to long-term institutional growth.
Previously Dodson was music director of the Bryan Symphony Orchestra, where he invited members of the New York Philharmonic to solo with the orchestra, created a television program to introduce classical music to new audiences, and commissioned a new work for each of his eight seasons. The orchestra twice received the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Sally Parker Education Award in national recognition of its efforts to bring classical music to children. Dodson has served as music director of Orchestra New York with concerts in Carnegie Hall and St. Luke’s Church, where the orchestra was in residence, and as music director of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Tucson, where he founded the Coronado Music Festival.
Dodson has guest conducted the Budapest Philharmonic, Rochester Philharmonic, National Philharmonic of Russia, National Symphony Orchestra of the Dominican Republic, National Symphony Orchestra of Bashkortostan, Omsk Academic State Symphony Orchestra, Bialystok Philharmonic, Irkutzk Symphony Orchestra, and the Symphony Orchestra UANL of Monterrey, Mexico. He has led concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Eastman Theater, and the Hungarian State Opera House and made seven tours as a guest conductor in Russia. He annually conducts Ballet Theater of Toledo’s production of The Nutcracker.
Dodson’s latest recording is a CD featuring the music of Robert Jager with the Omsk Philharmonic, the St. Louis Children’s Chorus, Leipzig Gewandhaus principal flautist Stephanie Winker, and Broadway actor Michael Lackey as narrator. Interested in new and neglected literature, he has commissioned and premiered over twenty works for orchestra, gave the first modern performance of Charles Martin Loeffler’s Symphony in One Movement: Hora Mystica, and revived an 18th-century overture by Giovanni Martini not heard in more than 200 years.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, Dodson studied composition with Robert Jager at Tennessee Technological University. He was mentored in strings by Ed Meyer, father of bass virtuoso and composer Edgar Meyer, and began his conducting career as an assistant to Maestro Yoel Levi at a summer music festival. Dodson holds a master of music degree in orchestral conducting from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, where he studied under renowned conducting pedagogue Frederik Prausnitz. He later studied with Paul Vermel at the Aspen Music School.
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