San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra has announced the appointment of PETER PASTREICH as executive director, effective June 1. He assumes the Robert A. Birman Executive Director Chair, named for his immediate predecessor, who left the orchestra last summer to become chief operating officer of the Louisville Orchestra and was recently promoted to chief executive officer there. Pastreich, a 40-year veteran in the orchestra management field, served as executive director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999, and had previously worked as executive director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. For the last decade he has been active as a consultant and teacher of management. He has played a leading role in the League of American Orchestras’ Essentials of Orchestra Management course since its inception in 2000, and was one of the architects of the League’s Orchestra Management Fellowship Program, inaugurated in 1979. The League presented him with its Gold Baton Award in 1999, and the same year he was made a chevalier des arts et des lettres by the French government. A native of Brooklyn, Pastreich began his management career by organizing a 1959 European tour by the Yale University Band during his undergraduate years at that institution. He discovered the profession of orchestra management the following year, when, as a medical student and part-time manager of the Village Civic Symphony in New York City, he attended the League’s course in orchestra management.
Photo of Peter Pastreich by Jamie Whittington
Posted May 22, 2009
