JoAnn Falletta
serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Virginia Symphony in the United States and Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland. She has guest conducted over a hundred orchestras in North America, and many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa and is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center of North Carolina. Recipient of the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, winner of the Stokowski Competition, and the Toscanini, Ditson and Bruno Walter conducting awards, Falletta has also received eleven ASCAP awards and serves on the U.S. National Council on the Arts. A champion of American music, she has presented nearly five hundred works by American composers including over one hundred world premières. Her Naxos recordings include the double Grammy Award winning disc of works by John Corigliano and GRAMMY® nominated discs of works of Tyberg, Dohnányi, Fuchs, Schubert, and Respighi. For more information, www.joannfalletta.com

Ulster Orchestra
The Ulster Orchestra is one of Northern Ireland’s cultural cornerstones and since its foundation in 1966 has become one of the major symphony orchestras in the United Kingdom and Ireland. JoAnn Falletta was appointed Principal Conductor in May 2011, the orchestra’s twelfth but first female and first American to be appointed to the post. The Hungarian-born violinist, Tamás Kocsis, leads the Orchestra. Northern Ireland’s only professional symphony orchestra performs in front of over 100,000 people across Northern Ireland each year averaging eighty to ninety performances, including its more than forty main season concerts, lunch-time concerts, BBC invitation concerts and concerts at many regional and national venues such as the National Concert Hall in Dublin and Royal Albert Hall in London. The Ulster Orchestra gratefully acknowledges the significant support it receives from its principal funder the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the BBC, Belfast City Council and many of Northern Ireland’s leading businesses. www.ulsterorchestra.com