Mark Powell, conductor
Winner of the Walter Hagen Conducting Prize, Mark Powell served as the sabbatical replacement for Professor Brad Lubman in the Conducting and Ensembles department of the Eastman School of Music for the spring semester of 2019 and returned as Visiting Associate Professor for the 2020-2021 academic year. Powell is currently Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of Orchestral Activities in the Arthur Satz Music Department at the University of Rochester, where he conducts the Chamber and Symphony Orchestras and teaches seminars in conducting, film music, and new music. He is currently Lead Conductor for the New Conductors Orchestra in Manhattan and from 2019 to 2023 served as associate professor on the faculty of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY.
The Ford Foundation recognized Powell’s unique contributions to American music with their Young American Conductor’s Prize, while Houston’s professional new music ensemble, Musiqa, followed by awarding him their VIP Award for his founding of The Discovery Series, a music and arts exploration series for elementary and secondary students at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts that, now supported by ExxonMobil, has served a quarter million Houston area students.
Engagements with the Fort Worth Symphony, the Netherlands Radio Symphony, the Korsholm Music Festival in Finland, the Rochester Philharmonic, and DaCamera of Houston have rounded out an increasingly busy schedule. He is represented in the U.S., Europe, and Asia by Modern Musical Arts. Praising Mark Powell’s “exceptionally vivid” Cleveland debut, The Plain Dealer joins in the admiration of critics and colleagues alike, with JoAnn Falletta calling Powell “a musician’s conductor” of “deep musical understanding and insight, excellent technique, and wonderful podium manner” and the NRC Handelsblad (Amsterdam) noting at his Concertgebouw debut his “impressively expressive final movements of the Mussorgsky cycle [Pictures at an Exhibition].”
