Alexander Frey - Conducting

Conducting

Frey was Principal Conductor of the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra from 1996 to 2002, and during that time was the only American music director of an Italian symphony orchestra.

Frey was appointed conductor of the Bohemia Symphony Orchestra (later named the Stern Chamber Orchestra) in Prague, Czech Republic, a position he has held since 2000. He was conductor of Prague's historic Karlin Theater from 2004 to 2008 where he conducted 50 performances per season.

His many recent guest conducting appearances include performances on five continents with the Rio de Janeiro Philharmonic, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the orchestra of the Arena di Verona, Athens State Orchestra (Greece), Sibelius Symphony Orchestra, Rome Philharmonic Orchestra, Seoul Royal Symphony Orchestra, Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra of Berlin, Brandenburg Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra of Sicily (Palermo), Bari Symphony Orchestra, and the Collegium Symphonium Veneto (Padua) among others. He also conducted Ensemble Europa (members of the Israel Philharmonic and Deutsche Oper orchestras) in sold-out concerts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Berlin commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps. In 2006, he conducted Prague's official orchestral gala concert (with the Stern Chamber Orchestra) celebrating Mozart's 250th birthday on the day of the composer's birth. In 2010, he was the only American conductor invited to conduct an Italian orchestra for the Festa della Repubblica, the Italian independence day on which all the major orchestras in Italy give concerts in honor of the occasion.

Frey has also been Music Director for major productions at the Edinburgh International Festival (where he was awarded the festival's Critics' Prize), the Wiener Festwochen (Theater an der Wien, Vienna), Venice Festival (Teatro La Fenice), Holland Festival, the Fifth European Festival, and the Copenhagen Opera Festival.

From 1992 to 1996, he was Music Director of Germany's most renowned theater, the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht, where he collaborated with the celebrated stage director Peter Zadek. Frey was the first American to hold a position at the Berliner Ensemble, as well as being the theater's first non-German Music Director; his historic predecessors who held the same music directorship included the composers Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. While there, Zadek and Frey's artistic collaboration made theater history by producing several revolutionary and innovative productions which received great international acclaim. They adapted Vittorio DiSica's classic film Miracle of Milan (Miracolo e Milano) for the stage using the actual entire dialogue script from the film. Frey devised the idea of restoring the entire original film score and performing it live throughout the play using exactly the same music cues as in the film, marking the first time this technique was ever used. He repeated this method for a subsequent production in Austria of a stage version of the film Arsenic and Old Lace. For Miracle of Milan, Frey and the production were nominated for a Berlin Theater Critics' Prize. Frey also produced and directed the Berliner Ensemble's A Paul Dessau Evening, a highly acclaimed multimedia retrospective of the musical and dramatic works of the theater's music director of the 1950s.