Zach Manzi, clarinet fellow and host

Zach Manzi is a second-year Clarinet Fellow at the New World Symphony. Mr. Manzi has enjoyed many recent performances with The Juilliard Orchestra and Wind Orchestra as well as new music groups AXIOM and the New Juilliard Ensemble in performance venues across New York City. He also participated twice in Juilliard's ChamberFest, a chamber music intensive occurring during winter recess, and gave the finale performance of the 2015 festival in Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater. A passionate educator, he was one of 20 students to be awarded a Morse Teaching Artist Fellowship, with which he taught music in a New York City public school during the 2014-15 academic year. With two classes of third-graders in Manhattan, he explored the role and relevance of classical music in the 21st-century. As a student at the Aspen Music Festival and School, Mr. Manzi performed with four orchestras and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, playing beside his influential teachers, Joaquin Valdepeñas, Burt Hara and Bil Jackson, in the Aspen Festival Orchestra and Chamber Symphony. He also spent a summer studying and performing at the Brevard Music Center Institute. At Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, where he spent the first two years of his undergraduate career, Mr. Manzi was awarded the Elliott and Ailsa Newman Prize in 2013, given to the most outstanding woodwind student in the school. As a first-year student, he won the Vanderbilt University Concerto Competition, making his solo orchestral debut with the Vanderbilt Orchestra performing Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie. He received his bachelor of music degree from The Juilliard School in 2015, where he studied with Jon Manasse. When away from the clarinet, he enjoys biking, cooking, writing, traveling and discovering new coffee shops.

Dean Whiteside, conductor

Dean Whiteside was born in New York City and trained in Vienna at the University of Music and Performing Arts. He is in his second season as the New World Symphony’s Conducting Fellow, where he leads a variety of performances and serves as assistant to Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas. Mr. Whiteside is founder and director of the Nashville Sinfonietta, hailed by The Tennessean as “a virtuoso band.” He opened the Blair School of Music’s 2013-14 season directing a multimedia realization of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross called “innovative” by The Tennessean and “deeply meditative and satisfyingly original” by ArtsNash. 

Mr. Whiteside’s European debut came in 2011 after winning the Jorma Panula Blue Danube Masterclass and Competition. As guest conductor he has led the Juilliard Orchestra, Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, Orlando Philharmonic, Polish Baltic Philharmonic, Rousse State Opera Orchestra, Sibiu Philharmonic, Wiener Kammerorchester and Zagreb Philharmonic, as well as the Vanderbilt Orchestra on a five-city tour of China. He has served as Cover Conductor to MTT and the San Francisco Symphony.

Mr. Whiteside’s awards include the 2017 Mahler Conducting Fellowship, Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation Conducting Scholarship, David Effron Conducting Fellowship, Bayreuth Festival Scholarship, David Rabin Performance Prize, and Second Prize and the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra Prize at the Sixth International Competition of Young Conductors Lovro von Matačić. He has received fellowships from the Aspen Music Festival, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Castleton Festival and Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich.

Mr. Whiteside has worked closely with such conductors as Bertrand de Billy, Fabio Luisi, Lorin Maazel, Jun Märkl, Kurt Masur, Jorma Panula, Leonard Slatkin and Robert Spano. He began his conducting studies with Robin Fountain at Vanderbilt University.