Robert Shaw (conductor)
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Robert Shaw (April 30, 1916 – January 25, 1999) was an American conductor most famous for his work with his namesake Chorale, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Shaw received 16 Grammy awards and was a 1991 recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.
Shaw was born in Red Bluff, California. In 1941 he founded the Collegiate Chorale, a group notable in its day for its racial integration. The group performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the NBC Symphony and Arturo Toscanini, who referred to Shaw as "the Maestro I have been looking for."
He went on to found the Robert Shaw Chorale in 1949, a group which produced numerous recordings and visited 30 countries in tours sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Shaw was named music director of the San Diego Symphony in 1953 and served in that post for four years. Only after his San Diego tenure did he become an apprentice again, studying the art of conducting with George Szell and serving as his assistant at the Cleveland Orchestra for eleven seasons. He also took over the fledgling Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and finetuned it into one of the finest all-volunteer choral ensembles sponsored by an American symphony orchestra. From 1967-1988 he was music director and conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In 1970 he founded the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus and worked to recreate the success he had had for Cleveland in preparing them for performances and recordings with their namesake symphony orchestra.
After stepping down from his Atlanta post in 1988, Shaw continued to conduct the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as its conductor emeritus, was a regular guest conductor with other orchestras including Cleveland, and taught in a series of summer festivals and week-long Carnegie Hall workshops for choral conductors and singers.
During his long career, Shaw drew attention to choral music and came to be considered the "dean" of American choral conductors, mentoring a number of younger conductors, including Margaret Hillis and Ann Howard Jones, and inspiring thousands of singers he worked with around the United States. He achieved such spectacular results that he raised choral standards in the United States to new heights, and many of his recordings are considered as benchmarks for choral singing. Although his formative years and much of his work occurred prior to the rise of mainstream interest in informed historic performance practice, his insistence on textual clarity and that the words being sung must be the foundation of musical interpretation ensured that his renditions remain remarkably effective and fresh even when compared against today's recordings (which often use smaller numbers of singers). He recorded many of the great choral-orchestral works more than once, and his performances of Handel's Messiah, Bach's Mass in B Minor, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and other similar masterworks remain world famous and highly regarded.
Mr. Shaw died in New Haven, Connecticut, of a stroke. He was visiting Yale to see a production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, which his son Thomas directed and acted in.
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