Sarah Hicks
Resident Conductor
FLORIDA PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

Sarah Hatsuko Hicks possesses versatile talents that make her equally at ease with symphony orchestras, opera houses and contemporary ensembles. Appointed Music Director and Conductor of the Westminster Orchestra in Princeton, NJ, from September 2001, she has already garnered praise for her innovative programming and vibrant musicianship.

As assistant conductor of the Reading Symphony Orchestra since the 1998-99 season, she has collaborated in the production of multi-media Family Concerts and has appeared frequently on subscription and children’s concerts.

Ms. Hicks concurrently holds the position of Staff Conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music, preparing the group for concerts with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle and Wolfgang Sawallisch. During the Orchestra’s residency at the Verbier (Switzerland) Festival in the summer of 1999, she assisted Sir Neville Marriner in a series of concerts. Invited to return to the Festival in 2000 as assistant conductor to the newly formed UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra, she prepared the ensemble for music director James Levine, as well as guest conductors Zubin Mehta, Paavo Jarvi and Yuri Temirkanov. Currently in her last season as assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Singers, the chorus of the Philadelphia Orchestra, she has prepared the ensemble for performances with both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, and has led them in radio broadcasts heard nationwide on National Public Radio.

Ms. Hicks was Music Director of Harvard University’s Lowell House Opera, conducting dynamic performances of Puccini’s La Boheme and Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri in Cambridge, MA. Her work with the Curtis Opera Studio has included a semi-staged performance of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites; she has assisted in productions of Tchaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Equally at home on the international stage, she performed Verdi’s Aida with the East Slovak State Opera Theater and was a coach with the Moravian Opera Theater in Oloumoc, Czech Republic. Recently invited to Japan by the New National Theatre Tokyo, she acted as assistant conductor to a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflote.

A committed proponent of the performance of new music, Ms. Hicks regularly leads the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in readings and performances of contemporary works. In addition to premiering works by young composers from both the Curtis Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, she has collaborated with Ned Rorem and Richard Danielpour. She has also conducted performances with Composers in the Shape of a Pear (Cleveland), premiering avant-garde works, and has been a guest conductor of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.

Sarah Hatsuko Hicks was born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in Honolulu, HI. Trained on both the piano and viola, she was a prizewinning pianist by her early teens. She received her BA magna cum laude from Harvard University as a composition major; her AIDS Oratorio was premiered at Harvard University in May of 1993, and a second performance, sponsored by the Fogg Art Museum, took place on World AIDS Day, December 1, 1993. She holds an Artists’ Degree in conducting from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with renowned pedagogue Otto-Werner Mueller. Ms. Hicks’s talents have been recognized with numerous prizes and scholarships; she received the Thomas Hoopes Prize for composition and Doris Cohen Levy Prize for conducting from Harvard University, and she was the recipient of the Helen F. Whitaker Fund Scholarship and a Presser Award during her time at Curtis.

Ms. Hicks’s past positions include Music Director of the Hawaii Symphony, an ensemble she founded in 1991 in her hometown of Honolulu and led for five seasons. Ms. Hicks has guest-conducted extensively both in the States and abroad, including the Silesian Philharmonic in Poland, the Tokyo Philharmonie, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia (formerly Concerto Soloists), and the symphony orchestras of Pottstown and Richmond; she has collaborated with numerous soloists including Nigel Kennedy, Dimitri Sitkovetsky and Hilary Hahn. In June 2002 she will make her debut with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.