Former Westporter Alexander Platt Selected as Maverick Music Director
Alexander Platt, who grew up in Westport and is a Staples High School grad, has been selected as musical director of Woodstock, N.Y.s Maverick Concerts, the oldest continuous summer chamber music series in the United States.
“Woodstock kind of reminds me of Westport 20 years ago,” Platt said in an interview with the Middletown Times Herald-Record. “Woodstock is just wonderful.”
Platt, whose parents Leatrice and Bernerd still live in the Greens Farms Road home where he grew up, takes over from the late Vincent Wagner, who was MaverickҒs music director for 16 years before his death last year.
Platt, 38, studied at Yale University and then Cambridge University in England before going on to conduct the Houston Symphony, Freiburg Philharmonic in Germany, City of London Sinfonia, and Aalborg Symfoniorkester in Denmark.
He lives in Chicago, where he serves as resident conductor of the Chicago Opera Theater. He is also the music director for three orchestras in the Midwest.
Platts twin brother Russell is a classical music editor at the “Goings On About Town” department of The New Yorker and is a noted composer of vocal and instrumental works.
A third Platt son, Spencer, five years younger than the twins, is a noted photojournalist who shoots for New York-based Getty Images and recently covered the war in Iraq.
