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Michael Palmer is best known to audiences as artistic director of the Bellingham Festival of Music, a post he has held since 1993. Under his leadership, the Festival has become internationally recognized, and live recordings from its annual concerts have been heard across the United States on National Public Radio, featuring some of the world's finest orchestral musicians and major guest artists. In 2006, he also assumed the post of artistic director of the Orchestral Institute at the new Quartz Mountain Music Festival in southwestern Oklahoma. Michael Palmer has long been considered one of this country's finest conductors. His professional career began at age 21, when he was invited by Robert Shaw to become assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where he was soon promoted to associate conductor. In 1975, Palmer became one of the first five young conductors in the United States chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts for its newly-established EXXON/Arts Endowment Conductor fellowships. As part of the EXXON/Arts Endowment program, Palmer was part of an exchange of conductors that summer between the ASO and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, where he conducted the NSO's summer classical series at the Kennedy Center. The following year, the NSO independently invited Palmer back to lead a more extensive series of summer concerts. In 1977, after 10 years in Atlanta with the ASO, Palmer accepted the position of music director of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. While at Wichita, he also served as guest conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestra for three consecutive seasons (1978-1981), and was co-principal guest conductor of the Denver Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1982. In 1989 Michael Palmer assumed the post of music director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, which he held until 1997. In 1994, Carnegie Hall invited Palmer and the NHSO to perform in New York City as part of their esteemed Visiting Orchestras Series. Palmer founded the American Sinfonietta in 1991, which brought him more prominent international attention through ten seasons of European tours under his leadership, playing to critical acclaim in the major concert halls of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Over the course of his career, Michael Palmer has made appearances as guest conductor with many US orchestras, including the Rochester Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Kansas City Philharmonic, and the San Diego Symphony, as well as orchestras in Austria, Poland, Greece and China. His recordings include an all-Mendelssohn disc (Summit Records), the five piano concertos of Beethoven with Garrick Ohlsson (Natural Soundfields), and Ned Rorem's english horn concerto with Thomas Stacy and the Rochester Philharmonic (New World Records). Michael Palmer has long been an advocate of high-quality performing experiences for young musicians, actively including education and adjudication as part of his overall professional vision. In 1974, under the auspices of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, he founded and was music director of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. Palmer joined the faculty of Wichita State University in 1999 as their orchestral conductor, then returned to Atlanta in August of 2004 as director of orchestras for Georgia State University, which in 2006 honored him with the title of Charles Thomas Wurm Distinguished Professor of Orchestral Studies. |
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[Photo: Ted Lane]