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Directors
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Matthew Savery
Music Director and Conductor
Celebrating his second season as Music Director of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra and continuing for a sixteenth season as Music Director of the Bozeman Symphony Orchestra and Symphonic Choir, Matthew Savery enjoys a rapidly expanding reputation for his multi-faceted career as an electrifying performer, dedicated orchestra builder and charismatic teacher.
Matthew Savery’s current season is highlighted by return engagements with Massachusetts’ Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Turkey’s Presidential Symphony Orchestra, as well as another re-engagement with the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra. Summer 2009 includes his sixteenth engagement with the Greater Bridgeport Symphony.
In addition to his duties with the Bozeman Symphony, where his innovative subscription, family and children’s programming earns consistent praise - and sold-out houses, Matthew Savery regularly offers the state’s schools a “Conductor in Residency” program that, for the past several seasons has accounted for dozens of hours per school year. He is much in demand as both a competition adjudicator and an in-school clinician, and has guest conducted throughout the region: The Nutcracker with the Montana Ballet; Annie, Damn Yankees and Guys and Dolls with Montana Theatreworks. Until 1999, Mr. Savery also served five seasons as Music Director of the Butte Symphony Orchestra and Chorale.
A native of Western Massachusetts, just “down the road” from the famed Tanglewood Music Festival, Matthew Savery graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music and received his Master of Music Degree from the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of a Teaching Assistantship to the prestigious studio of Gustav Meier and to which he returned in 2001 and 2006 as a Visiting Guest Lecturer. In addition to Mr. Meier, his principal teachers have been Pascal Verrot and Frank Battisti.
While at the University of Michigan, Matthew Savery was the founding Music Director of the University Campus Chamber Orchestra. Subsequently, he served as Music Director of the Comic Opera Guild of Ann Arbor, Massachusetts’ Stockbridge Sinfonia and the Tecumseh Orchestra in Michigan. He has also led performances with the Boise, Dayton, Fort Wayne, Long Island and Naples philharmonics, El Paso, Greater Bridgeport, Greater Lansing, Lake St. Clair, Quad City, Saginaw Bay, Sioux City, Springfield (MA, MO and OH), South Dakota and Virginia symphony orchestras, Missouri Chamber Orchestra, Cape May Music Festival, Canada’s Victoria Symphony, and Turkey’s Presidential Symphony Orchestra. In June, 2001 he made a notable debut with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, opening its acclaimed summer series at Conner Prairie. Mr. Savery was a member of the first class of the International Institute for Conductors in Kiev, Ukraine, and has led that country’s National Symphony Orchestra in public performance.
Matthew Savery is a recipient of the Eugene and Sadie Power Award for the Performing Arts. In October 1998, he and the Bozeman Symphony Orchestra were the subjects of a special feature on “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Russell Milburn
Choir Conductor
Russell Milburn is an active performer, conductor and teacher with a formal music education that began in Bozeman, Montana and ended in Europe. After studying under Lowell Hickman (Montana State University–Bozeman) for two years, Milburn went on to receive his Master of Vocal Performance degree (June 2001) through intense study of tonal and atonal solfege at the Lemmens Institute of Music and Drama in Leuven, Belgium. While his tenor instruction was principally guided by Gerda Lombaerts and Johan Uytterschaut, he was also an active participant in master classes by voice instructors Roland Wyatt, Rachel Ann Morgen, and Martin Hill. Along with his vocal performance degree, Milburn also acquired his teaching certification from the Lemmens Institute.
Milburn performed with the Flemish Radio Choir in modern choral productions recorded in the studio or performed live for public radio broadcast at venues throughout Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France. He also performed and recorded authentic Late Medieval and Renaissance chant with the renowned Gregorian chant ensemble, Psallentes. In addition, Milburn performed throughout Europe and recorded Baroque oratorio with the ensemble Cappella Brugensis based in Brugge, Belgium.
As a freelance tenor, Milburn’s solo work includes the following: the comic role of Polidoro in Mozart’s opera La Finta Semplice; Monsieur Vogelsang in Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirector; King Kaspar in Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors; Dr. Blind in Strauss’s Die Fledermaus; and Bushy in The Ballad of Baby Doe. Along with scenes from Offenbach’s La Fortunio and Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, Milburn has also performed solos on the concert stage by Copland (from The Tender Land orchestral suite), Ralph Vaughan Williams (Four Hymns for tenor and orchestra), J.S. Bach (Magnificat), and other composers (Britten, Ives, Schubert, Schumann, Rossini, and Beethoven).
Milburn has worked as a studio voice instructor at the Conservatory of Music and Art in Leuven, Belgium, and the Conservatory of Music in Anderlecht, Belgium. He was a high school and middle school choral conductor and teacher in the Bozeman Public Schools from 2003 to 2006. He has worked as Chorus Master for Bozeman’s Intermountain Opera, in their productions of Die Fledermaus and La Boheme (children’s chorus). He has served as a vocal adjudicator and currently operates a private vocal studio in Bozeman, where he resides with his wife and three children. He is beginning his second season as conductor of the Bozeman Symphonic Choir.