In Wednesday’s (2/11) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sarah Bryan Miller reports, “Fresh off its triumphant win in Sunday’s Grammy Awards [Best Orchestral Recording award for John Adams’s City Noir], the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra announced … a new president and CEO. She is Marie-Hélène Bernard, 46, a musician, lawyer and arts administrator. Her predecessor, Fred Bronstein, left the SLSO in May to become dean of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. A native of Québec, Bernard has been executive director and CEO of Boston’s early-music Handel and Haydn Society since 2007. Earlier, she worked for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Canton (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra.… Bernard starts officially on July 1 but said that she expects to spend ‘quite a bit of time’ in St. Louis before that.” Following studies in communications, media, and literature at Jean-de-Brébeuf College in Montréal, Bernard “attended law school at the University of Montréal and practiced corporate, tax and property law for six years in Canada,” subsequently earning an arts management degree from Montréal’s Concordia University. “In 1996 she won a prestigious year-long fellowship with the League of American Orchestras, the first Canadian to be accepted, and did residencies with the New York Philharmonic and Minnesota Orchestra.”
In her post at the helm of the Handel and Haydn Society, Bernard is interviewed in the current issue of Symphony magazine.
Posted February 12, 2015
Marie-Hélène Bernard photo by Matt Kurkowski
