“Have baton, will travel” does not appear on the business card
of Bridget-Michaele Reischl, associate professor of music and
Kimberly-Clark Professor of Music, but it would not be totally inappropriate
if it did.
In addition to her many contributions as conservatory faculty member, conductor of the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, and music director of Lawrence Opera Theatre, Reischl maintains an active guest-conducting schedule both internationally and in the United States. She is music director for the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra and, during the 2002-03 season, also served as staff conductor for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor for the Northern Illinois University Orchestra, Wisconsin State Honors Orchestra, Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, and Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. Worldwide, she has conducted such orchestras as the Orchestra Regionale della Toscana, Orchestra Haydn Bolzano e Trento, Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, San Francisco Women’s Philharmonic, the Oregon Mozart Players, and the Dayton Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra.
Winner of the Antonio Pedrotti International Conducting Competition, she also has been the recipient of the Karl Bohm International Conducting Prize, the Walter Hagen Memorial Conducting Prize, and Lawrence’s Young Teacher Award. When Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony comes around in the Freshman Studies rotation of works to be studied, she delivers a lecture on the composer and the composition that includes its performance by the LSO.
Reischl is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, where she studied conducting with David Effron, and continued her studies with Robert Spano and as a conducting fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with Seiji Ozawa, David Zinman, Murry Sidlin, and Simon Rattle.
At Lawrence this year she will conduct an eight-concert schedule with the LSO and serve as music director for an Opera Theatre production of Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Frances Poulenc; in recent years she has music-directed productions of Menotti’s “The Consul,” Puccini’s “Suor Angelica” and “Gianni Schicchi,” and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
