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Gregory R. Gentry returns for his fifth season (2010-11) as Chorus Master of The Phoenix Symphony.
Under Dr. Gentry’s leadership, the Phoenix Symphony Chorus has grown in size and successfully taken on extraordinarily challenging new repertoire, including Grey’s Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio, Golijov’s Ainadamar, and Adam’s Nixon in China. The February 2008 world premiere of Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio was followed by the Phoenix Symphony Chorus reprising their work with the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra in July 2008, punctuated by the March 2009 Naxos commercial recording release of the work. In versatile contrast, select members of the Phoenix Symphony Chorus performed to sold-out audiences for the May 2009 concert A Salute to Rodgers & Hammerstein.
February 2009 marked Dr. Gentry’s Phoenix Symphony conducting debut, with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. He appeared at Carnegie Hall for the second time in June 2008, to conduct Schubert’s Mass in G, and again to conduct Mozart’s Coronation Mass in 2010, and will return a fourth time at Avery Fisher Hall in 2011. His conducting technique has been guided by studies with Eph Ehly and George Lynn, as well as additional work with Brian Priestman, Dale Warland, and Gary Hill. Both a singer and percussionist, Dr. Gentry has performed under the baton of Dave Brubeck, Aaron Copland, Karel Husa, Jorge Mester and Robert Shaw.
Dr. Gentry has worked in many facets of choral research and conducting. His edition of "Dnes Hhristos" (Musica Russica, 2009), Vasilii Titov's Seventeenth-Century Moscow Baroque Liturgical Choral Concerto for 12 voices—premiered in Russian by the Oregon Repertory Singers in 2001—is the first-ever published Western edition of this work. His edition of Jean Philippe Rameau's "Cor meum et caro mea" from Quam dilecta tabernacula premiered in February 2005 at the American Choral Directors Association national convention in Los Angeles.
Among many professional organizations, Dr. Gentry is an active member of the American Choral Directors Association, Chorus America, the National Association for Music Education, and the National Collegiate Choral Organization. He is President-Elect of the Arizona Choral Directors Association, and the founding director of Southwestern Liederkranz, Dr. Gentry is the Director of Choral Performance at the Arizona State University School of Music, with the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. In this capacity at ASU, he conducts the Symphonic Chorale, teaches graduate and undergraduate conducting and literature, and administers the doctoral, masters and undergraduate choral conducting program (which includes over 300 students engaged in choral music). Dr. Gentry earned his doctorate from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.