About Steven Fox
American conductor Steven Fox is Artistic Director and Conductor of the Clarion Music Society in New York City. The first period-instrument orchestra with a regular concert season in New York, the Clarion Music Society was founded in 1957 by philanthropist Thomas Newbold Morgan and conductor Newell Jenkins.
With support from the Society, Steven Fox founded Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg as Russia’s first period-instrument orchestra. With these world-class musicians, he revived the works of many of the greatest 18th-century Russian composers, including Dmitri Bortniansky, Maxim Berezovsky and Evsigney Fomin. Under his leadership, the orchestra has performed worldwide and recorded three compact discs. Following his success in St. Petersburg, the Clarion Board appointed him the Artistic Director of the Society, charging him to build upon the orchestra’s remarkable legacy and to revive its concert series to its former splendor
An accomplished musicologist, Mr. Fox unearthed the Sinfonia in C by Maxin Berezovsky (c.1770) of the Russian Empire, which the BBC World Service heraldedas an “absolutely remarkable discovery.” He conducted the work’s world premiere at the Royal Academy of Music, London, in 2003.
Steven’s most recent concerts with the Choir and Orchestra of the Clarion Music Society include an all-Mozart program and a Beethoven program, both at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York, a program of CPE Bach, Haydn and Vivaldi at The Morgan Library & Museum, and an all-Bach program at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. The Eastern Enlightenment: Russian Jewels from the Court of Catherine the Great was the final concert of Clarion’s 2006/2007 season and was performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
Recent guest conducting engagements have brought Mr. Fox to New York City Opera as Associate Conductor, working with Jane Glover on Purcell’s King Arthur, and with Ransom Wilson on Handel’s Agrippina. Mr. Fox has taught Bach choral works at Yale’s Sacred Music Institute and early oratorio masterclasses with voice students at the Juilliard School. Steven has also conducted the Choir of St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, at the Jewish Museum’s Centenary Celebration, and music for services in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and the Brompton Oratory in London.
Fox began studying music at the Horace Mann School under pianist John Contiguglia and conductor and composer Johannes Somary. He went on to study Music and Russian at Dartmouth College, graduating as a Senior Fellow with High Honors, and continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he received an MMus degree with Distinction along with three of the institution’s most prestigious awards: the Sir Thomas Armstrong Prize, the Peter L Huray Award and the Alan Kirby Prize.