Jeannette Sorrell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeannette Sorrell is an American conductor and harpsichordist. A Grammy Award winner, she is the founder and music director of Apollo's Fire Baroque Orchestra. She is the subject of the 2019 documentary by Oscar-winning director Allan Miller, Playing With Fire: Jeannette Sorrell and the Mysteries of Conducting (commercially released in 2023).[1]
Youth
Jeannette Sorrell was born in San Francisco in 1965. Her father, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, was a drama critic, linguist, and professor. Her mother, an American, was a nursing professor. According to the London Jewish Chronicle, Sorrell's father was a Holocaust survivor who completely hid his story and his Jewish identity from the family until he was 87.[2]
Jeannette Sorrell grew up studying piano, violin, ballet and theatre.[3] In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she describes how she spent her first year of piano lessons (at the age of 9) practicing on a paper keyboard that she made, because the family had no piano.[4] Her family moved to the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia when she was 14. This is where she first encountered early American folk music and shape-note hymns, which later developed into an artistic interest for her. At 16 she began studying conducting and composition, and founded an instrumental and vocal ensemble for which she arranged all of the music.
Studies: 1988-91
Sorrell received a full scholarship to the Artist Diploma program of Oberlin Conservatory, where she studied harpsichord with Lisa Crawford and orchestral conducting with Robert Spano. At age 24 she became one of the youngest students[5] in the conducting program at the Tanglewood Festival, where she studied under Leonard Bernstein and Sir Roger Norrington.[6] She was the only woman in the conducting class. Upon graduating from Oberlin in 1990, she was chosen as a conducting fellow at the Aspen Music Festival.
She then moved to Amsterdam to study harpsichord with Gustav Leonhardt. The following year she won First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the 1991 Spivey International Harpsichord Competition held in Atlanta, GA, competing in a field of 70 contestants from Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel and the U.S.[6]
Founding of Apollo's Fire
In 1991, Sorrell returned to the U.S. and was immediately invited to interview for the position of Assistant Conductor with The Cleveland Orchestra. She had not applied for the job, but was recruited as a candidate based on her conducting work at Aspen and Tanglewood. In various media interviews, Sorrell has recounted her meeting with Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Christoph von Dohnanyi, who told her that he could not give her an audition because the audience in Cleveland would never accept a woman as a conductor. Sorrell replied that she had actually not sought this post and she really wanted to work with period instruments. Following this interview, the orchestra's artistic administrator Roger Wright offered to help Sorrell launch a period-instrument orchestra in Cleveland. Sorrell was 26.[7]
The ensemble made its debut in 1992 under the name of Apollo's Fire - The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra. The debut concerts were sold out. Apollo's Fire began receiving touring invitations within a few months. Since then, Sorrell has led Apollo's Fire as Artistic Director and has developed an international reputation for creative programming.[6]
