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Kay George Roberts, principal conductor

Kay George Roberts is the founder and music director of the New England Orchestra (NEO). Based in Lowell, Massachusetts, NEO is committed to building a vital artistic partnership with the community by linking cultures through music.

Guest conducting engagements have included the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Nashville and National Symphony orchestras as well as the Orchestra Svizzera Italiana, where she conducted Jazz greats Max Roach, Diane Reeves, and the New York Voices. Ms. Roberts has served as a cover conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and Detroit Symphony Orchestra. In addition, she is the conductor for Philadelphia’s Opera North performances of Leslie Burrs’ award-winning opera, Vanqui. In 2006, The Washington Post praised her “intensely paced concert version of Vanqui, carefully balancing soloists, orchestra and chorus”.

An advocate for new and overlooked music, critics admire her "precision and passion" in leading audiences "to make new discoveries.” She premiered Jennifer Higdon's Fanfare Ritmico at the Blossom Music Festival with the Cleveland Orchestra and was co-conductor for the highly acclaimed 2004 Sphinx Inaugural Gala Concert in Carnegie Hall. In 2007, she led the Sphinx Symphony in the world premiere of Michael Abels’ Delights and Dances in Detroit’s Orchestra Hall to celebrate the Sphinx Competition’s 10th anniversary.

A champion of music education, Ms. Roberts is a professor of music at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and director of the UML String Project, a community outreach program for public school students that fosters diversity in classical music. She is the first woman to earn the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in conducting from Yale University where she studied with Otto-Werner Mueller. Ms. Roberts also studied conducting at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein, Gustav Meier and Seiji Ozawa, and at the Bachakademie Stuttgart with Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

The recipient of many honors, Ms. Roberts was presented with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for her "outstanding and invaluable service to the community" and was named a University of Michigan Presidential Professor - “one of the highest honors bestowed on visiting artists and
scholars” - for her work with the Sphinx Symphony.