Today marks the 85th birthday of one of America's pre-eminent conductors and composers, Lukas Foss. Of German birth, his early musical education of piano, composition, and flute took place in Berlin and Paris. After moving to the United States with his family in 1937 to escape the Nazi regime, he attended the Curtis Institute where his teachers included Isabelle Vengerova, Rosario Scalero, and Fritz Reiner; his college summers were spent with conductor Sergei Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Music Center and with composer Paul Hindemith at Yale University.
Success came at the age of 22 when his cantata The Prairie, based on Carl Sandburg’s poem, won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award. He served as pianist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra 1944 -1950, received a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition in 1945, a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome 1950–51, and won a Fulbright grant 1950-1952. On October 7, 1951, his second piano concerto was premiered in Venice with Foss as the soloist.
His numerous accomplishments include music director of the Ojai Festival, election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, music director and conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonia, the Kol Israel Orchestra of Jerusalem, music director of the Milwaukee Symphony, and many appearances as guest conductor throughout the USA and Europe.
The Library has his Orchestral Works and his piano arrangement of Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid . His work as a conductor include Compassion: A Tribute to Sir Yehudi Menuhin, and The Complete Clarinet Music of Carl Maria von Weber.