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, a native of New York City, is in his first season as the Conducting Fellow of the New World Symphony, 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 John Pitcher of NPR 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, which was called “innovative” by The Tennessean and “deeply meditative and satisfyingly original” by ArtsNash. 

Mr. Whiteside won second prize and the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra Prize at the Sixth International Competition of Young Conductors Lovro von Matačić in 2015. He was the 2015 David Effron Conducting Fellow at the Chautauqua Institution Music Festival and served as a conducting fellow at the 2014 Castleton Festival, where he was mentored by Lorin Maazel. He has recently appeared with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich at the Sixth International David Zinman Masterclass, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra at the Malko Competition and The Juilliard Orchestra, where he led rehearsals as the assistant to Fabio Luisi. 

Mr. Whiteside’s European debut came in 2011 after winning the Jorma Panula Blue Danube Masterclass and Competition. He has since led the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, Rousse State Opera Orchestra, Sibiu Philharmonic, Wiener Kammerorchester and Zagreb Philharmonic, as well as the Vanderbilt Orchestra on a five-city tour of China. 

Mr. Whiteside trained at the Aspen Conducting Academy with Robert Spano and at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where he studied with Simeon Pironkoff and Yuji Yuasa, and from which he graduated with distinction. He participated in master classes led by such conductors as Bertrand de Billy, Mark Elder, Fabio Luisi, Jun Märkl, Kurt Masur and Jorma Panula. He began his conducting studies with Robin Fountain at Vanderbilt University, where he graduated cum laude with a double major in viola and philosophy.