“Tucson newcomer Welz Kauffman likely will be sitting in the audience for all three performances” of True Concord Voices & Orchestra’s season-opening concerts this weekend, writes Cathalena E. Burch in Tuesday’s (10/19) Arizona Daily Star. “Kauffman, the former longtime president and CEO of the prestigious Ravinia Festival outside Chicago, is True Concord’s newly appointed managing director…. He comes here after a 20-year career with Ravinia and has held artistic leadership roles with the New York and Los Angeles philharmonic orchestras. He retired from Ravinia in summer 2020…. Kauffman knew [True Concord founder and music director Eric] Holtan through the Tucson Desert Song Festival, which hosted the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute singers for several years…. Kauffman also was familiar with Tucson through former Tucson Symphony Orchestra Music Director George Hanson, with whom he worked at the Atlanta Symphony in the late 1980s, and through his husband’s sister and parents, who lived in Tucson. ‘It just felt that things came together nicely,’ the 60-year-old Kauffman said. Kauffman is True Concord’s first full-time managing director in its 17 years…. The ensemble has grown … and became too big to run without a full-time manager, Holtan said.”
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