International Conductors Guild
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Dr. Scott Woodard
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Member Bio Scott E. Woodard was born in Huntington, WV and educated in the public schools of Cabell County. Dr. Woodard received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Music Education from Marshall University and the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts from Boston University. As a teacher, Dr. Woodard’s career has spanned twenty-seven years. His teaching positions included Wirt County High School, Ceredo-Kenova High School, and Winfield High School. Dr. Woodard served as the Director of Bands at Winfield High School from 1990 – 2006. The Winfield HS Band under his direction performed in master class sessions with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and was the 2005 Honor Finalist Concert Band at the WV Music Educators Conference in Morgantown, WV. He is currently the Director of Instrumental Music, and Interim Associate Provost and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at West Virginia State University in Institute, WV, where he serves as sponsor of NAfME Collegiate Chapter #442 and teaches conducting courses. Dr. Woodard is the Associate Conductor of the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of the Charleston Chamber Orchestra. Dr. Woodard’s bands have consistently been rated Superior at state, regional and national festivals of music, and his WVSU Jazz Ensemble performed by invitation in Vienna, Graz and Salzburg, Austria in November of 2007. His study of conducting has taken him all over the world as a contestant in workshops and competitions. In 2005 and 2011, Dr. Woodard conducted orchestras of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society and the Mariinsky Theatre in concerts throughout the former Russian capitol. In 2006, he was named First Prize winner of the International Conductor’s Workshop Competition and served as Guest Conductor of the Macon Symphony Orchestra in Macon, GA. In the summer of 2011, Dr. Woodard was awarded the First Prize at the International Academy of Advanced Conducting in St. Petersburg and is now a full faculty member of the Academy. He is a member of the national Association for Music Education, the WV Bandmasters Association, The College Band Director’s National Association, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Music Fraternity, and The Conductor’s Guild. Dr. Woodard lives in Scott Depot, WV with his wife Nafi, who is a family practice physician, and their son, Gabriel.
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Dr. Rodney Wynkoop
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Member Bio Rodney Wynkoop has served as conductor and artistic director of the Choral Society of Durham since 1986. He is director of University Choral Music and Professor of the Practice of Music at Duke University, and served as the Director of Chapel Music and conductor of the Duke Chapel Choir from 1989 to 2018. He was awarded Duke University’s Meritorious Service Award for Executive Leadership in 2009. Honors Dr. Wynkoop’s work as conductor of the Choral Society of Durham, the Duke University Chorale and Duke Chapel Choir, and the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Durham (an elite chamber choir that he founded in 1996) has earned him critical acclaim for artistic excellence and innovative programming. He has been honored for his artistic contributions by Triangle-area newspapers, including the Independent Weekly, the News & Observer. He has led both the Choral Society and the Vocal Arts Ensemble in invited appearances at the convention of the Southern Division of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) and Vocal Arts Ensemble at the ACDA national convention in February 2005, in Los Angeles. In 2000, he was honored by the Durham Arts Council with the James L. Nicholson award for his contributions in promoting the careers of local singers and composers. In 2002, he received the Lara Hoggard Award for Distinguished Service in Choral Music in North Carolina, presented by the North Carolina ACDA. Workshops and Tours Dr. Wynkoop has directed conducting workshops across the state, including the Summer Organ Institute in Winston-Salem. Abroad, he served as resident guest conductor of a professional civic chorus in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, twice toured Russia with the Triangle Russian Choral Exchange, and made several tours with the Duke Chorale and Duke Chapel Choir, performing in Vienna, Eastern Europe, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Great Britain, and China. He conducted singers from all his choirs in a 2006 Carnegie Hall performance of Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem and in a 2009 performance of Dona Nobis Pacem and Haydn’s Mass in Time of War as part of the International Haydn Festival in Vienna, Austria. Premieres and Recordings Wynkoop has conducted the world premieres of many choral works, including those of Mendelssohn and Ives, as well as works commissioned by the Choral Society from Daniel Gawthrop and Steven Sametz and by the Vocal Arts Ensemble from Imant Raminsh. He also prepared the Choral Society for the world premiere of John Rutter’s Cantus. Choral groups under his direction have released numerous recordings, including a live-performance CD of Orff’s Carmina Burana by the Choral Society of Durham and two CD recordings of Handel’s Messiah by the Duke Chapel Choir. Most recently, the Vocal Arts Ensemble has released a CD recording on the Arsis label, entitled My Spirit Sang All Day, featuring works by Finzi, Barber, Rutter, Locklair, McCullough, Kodály, and other 20th-century composers.
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Mr. John Yaffe
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Member Bio From the 1990s on, UK-based American conductor John Yaffé became a highly respected member of New York City’s musical community. He conducted regularly at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, and The 92nd Street Y, and has been lauded consistently by the New York Times and Opera News for his ability to inspire performances with “transcendent concentration, exemplary preparation, freedom, and commitment.” Last year, he travelled to Prague, where he led recordings of piano concertos of Frédéric Chopin and Robert DeGaetano. In recent seasons, he led the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra on their tour of the United States, led the Colorado Springs Symphony, Staten Island Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic (at the Warsaw Autumn Contemporary Music Festival), San Antonio Symphony, Chattanooga Symphony, Chattanooga Opera, Walla Walla Symphony, and the Turkish State Opera. At the invitation of the American Embassy in Tirana, Albania, he led the first American musical ever produced in that country (West Side Story). During his career, Yaffé was championed by several major figures: the great baritone Tito Gobbi, who invited him as musical assistant for his master classes in Florence, Italy; Julius Rudel, Music Director of New York City Opera, who invited him to join the company as an apprentice conductor; the legendary singer George London, who, after attending one of Yaffé’s performances, invited him to join the staff at the Washington (D.C.) National Opera; and Leonard Bernstein, who was Executor of Marc Blitzstein’s estate and entrusted Yaffé with revisions to Blitzstein’s opera Regina. Engagements at the Wolf Trap Festival and with symphony orchestras and opera houses in Maryland, Connecticut, Michigan, California followed. Soon after, Yaffé moved to Europe. He spent ten years as Répétiteur and Conductor in the German opera houses of Hagen, Münster, Osnabrück and Stuttgart. In addition, he served as Music Director of the Stuttgarter Operettentheater and was a guest conductor with the Städtisches Orchester Remscheid, the Südwestdeutsche Philharmonie, the Symphonie-Orchester Graunke of Munich, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart, the Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, and the Alt-Wiener-Strauss-Ensemble. John Yaffé is currently Senior Lecturer and Co-Course Director for Music at Coventry (England) University and regularly tours the UK and Europe with his wife, as part of their funded Yiddish Folksong Project.
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Barbara Yahr
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Member Bio Now in her seventeenth season with the GVO, Music Director Barbara Yahr continues to lead the orchestra to new levels of distinction. With blockbuster programming and internationally renowned guest artists, the GVO under Barbara’s baton has grown into an innovative, collaborative institution offering a full season of classical music to our local community. A native of New York, Ms.Yahr’s career has spanned from the United States to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her previous posts include Principal Guest Conductor of the Munich Radio Orchestra, Resident Staff Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony under Maestro Lorin Maazel and conductor of the Pittsburgh Youth Orchestra. She has appeared as a guest conductor with such orchestras as the Bayerische Rundfunk, Dusseldorf Symphoniker, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Frankfurt Radio, Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, Janacek Philharmonic, New Japan Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington D.C. She has also conducted orchestras in Anchorage, Calgary, Chattanooga, Columbus, Detroit, Flint, Louisiana, New Mexico, Lubbock, and Richmond, as well as the Ohio Chamber Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber, Rochester Philharmonic, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, New World Symphony, and the Chautauqua Festival Symphony Orchestra. She has also appeared in Israel conducting in both Jerusalem and Elat. As an opera conductor, she has led new productions in Frankfurt, Giessen, Tulsa, Cincinnati, Minnesota and at The Mannes School of Music in NYC. She has coached the actors on the set of the Amazon Series, Mozart in the Jungle, and last season conducted the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra and musicians from the Pittsburgh Symphony. Portrait of conductor Barbara Yahr Ms. Yahr is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Middlebury College where she studied piano and philosophy. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Conducting from the Curtis Institute of Music where she studied with Max Rudolf and an MM in Music Theory from the Manhattan School of Music. She was a student of Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School in Hancock, Maine. Ms. Yahr’s commitment to finding new ways to reach a broader population with music ultimately led her into the field of music therapy. She is a Board Certified Music Therapist, with an MA in Music Therapy from NYU and post-graduate certification from the world-renowned Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy in New York City. Her pioneering, community music therapy project, Together in Music, brings orchestral music to the special needs community with uniquely interactive programs.
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Esther Yoo
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Member Bio n an era when technical perfection is a given, the spotlight inevitably shifts to interpretation, and Esther Yoo’s playing has been described as ”mesmerising”, “soulful“, “ spellbinding“, “intensely lyrical”, and “taking her audience into an enchanted garden.” She performs with many leading conductors – including Vladimir Ashkenazy (with whom she and the Philharmonia Orchestra recorded the Sibelius, Glazunov and Tchaikovsky concertos for Deutsche Grammophon), Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thierry Fischer, Vasily Petrenko, Karina Canellakis and Andrew Davis – and orchestras such as the Philharmonia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie or the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. She has also performed at a range of prominent festivals including the BBC Proms and Aspen Music Festival. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra appointed her as their inaugural Artist-in-Residence in 2018, through which Esther participated extensively in educational and outreach projects, alongside their concert performances in London and across the UK. Esther has appeared in recital at Lincoln Center and Wigmore Hall, and in 2018 she featured prominently on the soundtrack and accompanying Decca disc of the feature film, On Chesil Beach. The piano trio, Z.E.N., (which she co-founded together with fellow former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists Zhang Zuo and Narek Hakhnazaryan), tours widely in North America, Europe and Asia. They chose works by Brahms and Dvorak for their first recording and are currently preparing their second recording which, like the first, will be released on DG.
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Mr. Channing Yu
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Member Bio American orchestra and opera conductor Channing Yu is Music Director of the Mercury Orchestra in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Associate Artistic Director of the Refugee Orchestra Project in New York City. He is the national winner of the 2010 American Prize in Orchestral Conducting in the community orchestra division. He recently served as Music Director of the Dudley Orchestra in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Music Diretor of Bay Colony Brass in Watertown, Massachusetts; Leader of the Powers Community String Orchestra in Belmont, Massachusetts; and Conductor of the Massachusetts Youth Symphony Project Preparatory String Orchestra in Belmont, Massachusetts. He has also served as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Lowell House Opera, the oldest opera company in New England, where he conducted over thirty fully staged performances with orchestra, including Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Puccini’s Turandot, Verdi’s Otello, and Puccini’s Tosca. For his musical direction of Tosca, he was awarded second prize in the 2011 American Prize in Opera Conducting national competition. He served as guest conductor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in its production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s baroque opera Les arts florissants. He was guest conductor of Atrium Winds in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. He was also invited to guest conduct the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Of the Lowell House Opera’s performance of Otello, The Harvard Crimson wrote, “The production’s hero was the orchestra, under the keen direction of Channing Yu. Yu was able to channel all the energy of the 80-member ensemble into moments that spanned the entire emotional spectrum—from sheer joy to complete misery. The sound produced by the orchestra was stylish, heartfelt, and on the whole, refined.” The Boston Musical Intelligencer noted, “The real star of the performance was the orchestra, led with great skill by Channing Yu.” He began formal study of conducting at Harvard University with James Yannatos; there he served as assistant conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and conductor of the Toscanini Chamber Orchestra. Since then, he has worked with a number of conductor teachers in the master class setting, including Kenneth Kiesler, Roberto Paternostro, Diane Wittry, Charles Peltz, and Frank Battisti. He was invited as one of fourteen conductors worldwide to work with conductors Neeme Järvi, Leonid Grin, and Paavo Järvi in master classes at the Leigo Lakes Music Days Festival in Estonia. He worked with George Pehlivanian conducting L’Ensemble Orchestral de València in Spain, with Johannes Schlaefli conducting the Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra in Bulgaria, and with Sandro Gorli conducting the Divertimento Ensemble in Italy. Channing Yu grew up in Pennsylvania.
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