Mozart Requiem: Richard Prior Conductor

Richard Prior

Award-winning conductor and composer, Richard Prior is Director of Orchestral Studies at Emory University and Senior Lecturer in Composition where he holds the Edward Goodwin Scruggs Chair and conducts the Emory University and Youth Symphony orchestras. Dr. Prior is also Conductor of the Rome Symphony Orchestra (GA) where he holds the Georgia Power Conducting Chair. Prior’s musical training began in his native England, where he received degrees in composition and conducting from Leeds and Nottingham Universities. He has taught at several universities and colleges in the United States and at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University where he was a Visiting Fellow in Music.

In demand as a guest conductor and clinician, Prior has led numerous honor and all-state orchestras and a variety of professional consortiums from the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and Minnesota Orchestra. He has appeared with the Charlotte Symphony, the New Orleans Civic Symphony, the Rome Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony of Ukraine, the Odessa Philharmonic and the Cairo National Symphony, Egypt. He has been reviewed in the press as having “stirring conviction,” “precision,” and “stylishness and flexibility,” noting the “meteoric rise” of ensembles under his direction. Prior’s principal teachers and mentors include Sir Simon Rattle and James Paul. Prior is a founding member and past president of the College Orchestra Directors Association, South Central Division and currently serves on boards of various professional and educational organizations.



From music written as a high school student performed in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and his professional debut at London’s Westminster Abbey, Prior’s work has been performed, recorded, and broadcast around the world. Atlanta performances have included intimations of immortality and TRIPTYCH both premiered by the Vega String Quartet, The Darkening Land with clarinet virtuoso Richard Stoltzman and the Pulitzer-nominated choral-orchestral work Stabat Mater, the subject of a 2009 PBS broadcast. Prior’s Symphony No. 3 received its premiere at Emory in 2011 and his elegy for aurora dedicated to the memory of those lost in the tragedy in Aurora, CO received multiple performances in 2012-13.

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Robert Spano commissioned and premiered …of shadow and light… (incantations for orchestra) in October, 2013. Subsequent critical review called the work “stunning” and “jubilant and exuberant”; the piece identified Prior as “perhaps the most gifted of the Atlanta composers” citing his mastery of orchestration, lyricism and musical drama. The ASO and Robert Spano will present performances of his Symphony No. 3 in a special revised edition for their 70th Season celebrations in 2014-15.

A winner of numerous institutional awards for his compositions and teaching, Prior won the 2008 Harvey Philips Award for Excellence in Composition at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and was the recipient in 2009 of Emory University’s Winship Senior Faculty Award and the 2011 Crystal Apple Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. His choral-orchestral work hymn for nations united received Awards of Merit in two categories (Symphonic Music and Composition) in the 2013 Global Music Awards. Current projects include works for the ASO’s Principal Flutist, Christina Smith, Principal Oboist, Elizabeth Koch Tiscione, a third string quartet for the Vega Quartet and a concerto for flute and strings for renowned flutist and former NFA president, Jonathan Keeble.