Author of Lost in the Stars
Charles Barber (MA, DMA Stanford) is a conductor active in concert, opera, and recordings.
Dr. Barber began piano at six, violin and trumpet at ten, at 14 wrote a piano concerto, and at 15 conducted his first orchestra. He has studied with George Corwin, Jaroslav Karlovsky, and Andor Toth. In Los Angeles, he studied arranging and worked on recordings with the late Marty Paich.
In opera and musical theatre Barber has conducted Die Fledermaus, Merry Widow, La Perichole, Crazy for You, Fanny, Guys and Dolls, virtually all of Gilbert and Sullivan, West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, Most Happy Fella, Man of LaMancha, Orpheus in the Underworld, Magic Flute, Merrily We Roll Along, Magic Flute, Tosca, Gräfin Mariza, Hansel and Gretel, Pagliacci, Gianni Schicchi, La Traviata, and Marriage of Figaro. Barber will lead his first Peter Grimes in 2005, and in the same year make his conducting debut in St Petersburg, Russia.
He has contributed articles on conducting to numerous books and journals, these published by Yale, Oxford, Greenwood, and Cambridge. His essay on Rehearsal Technique will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Barber contributed some 100 entries to the Seventh Edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He is co-author with José Bowen of the International Dictionary of Conductors (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
He also worked as advisor to the BBC's award-winning 1994 film documentary, The Art of Conducting, and as music advisor to its sequel The Art of Conducting -- Legendary Conductors of a Golden Era (1997). He founded the Conductors on Film Collection at Stanford University, now acknowledged to be the largest of its kind in North America.
"I never write letters of recommendation, so this is an exception. Charles Barber is a scholar and a conductor who adores and understands music. He is also the most amusing, garrulous, knowledgeable, erudite, friendly, funny, generous etc etc etc etc person imaginable. We have become friends, and he pretends to believe that I have taught him something."
-- Carlos Kleiber
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