Uri Rom studied conducting in Tel-Aviv and Berlin, as well as Baroque music and harpsichord at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. Recently, he has completed his PhD degree summa cum laude at the Humanities Faculty of Berlin’s Technical University, writing on “Key-Relatedness as a Driving Force behind Mozart’s Compositional Process”.

 

He worked as a conductor and pianist at a number of opera houses and directed numerous concerts and opera productions. Among the orchestras he conducted are RIAS Youth Orchestra, the German Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonic Orchestra Hradec Králové. For many years he taught orchestral conducting at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Between 1997 and 2007 he was musical director of the Young Orchestra of the Free University Berlin and in 1999 he founded the Chamber Academy Berlin, a chamber orchestra focusing on Baroque and classical Repertoire. In 2004 he initiated the first modern performance of Joseph Weigl’s early romantic opera Die Schweizer Familie, also issuing a much acclaimed world première recording of the work.

 

Uri Rom also performs as a pianist and harpsichord player in chamber music formations and is active as a specialist on Mozart’s music. His Rondo for Natural Horn and Orchestra was published in 2001 by Edition Dohr in Cologne. In November 2006 his completion of Mozart’s horn concerto fragment K. 494^a was premièred at the chamber music hall of the Philharmonie in Berlin. Published a few months later, it was highly acclaimed by Ulrich Konrad in the 2007 issue of Acta Mozartiana.

 

In recent years Uri Rom increasingly focuses on composition and scholarly research. In 2002 he won a prize in the composition contest of the Opera of Neukölln (Berlin). Besides songs, orchestral and chamber works, premiered mainly in Berlin, he was commissioned to set to music Dante Alighieri’s early text La vita nova for a production of the Berlin Renaissance Theatre in Leverkusen and Berlin in March 2010. His setting of Dante’s poems was praised by the Neue Musikzeitung as “theatrical music at its best”. Uri Rom regularly presents at various international musicological and music-theoretical conferences. In Fall 2011 he will present papers on his research topics at the 7^th European Music Analysis Conference (EUROMAC) and at the annual meeting of the American Society for Music Theory (SMT).