Robert Kapilow

Rob Kapilow, a composer, conductor, and pianist, has been affectionately nicknamed "the pied piper of classical music" because of his talent for unraveling the mysteries of classical music for audiences of all ages and backgrounds.  His "What Makes It Great?"TM made its debut over a decade ago on NPR's Performance Today. With its accessible10-minute format it quickly attracted an enthusiastic and wide base of fans and developed into full-length concert evenings, which are now a mainstay of Lincoln Center's "Great Performers" series (with its first nationwide broadcast on "Live from Lincoln Center" in January and two video podcasts now available on iTunes), the Celebrity series in Boston, and at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.  He also appears regularly throughout the U.S. and Canada, both with "What Makes it Great?"TM  and FamilyMusik©, in public and corporate venues. He has conducted new works of musical theater including Tony Award-winning Nine on Broadway. He is the conductor/creative director for FamilyMusik© at Lincoln Center, Boston's Celebrity Series, the 92nd Street Y, co-director of the Rutgers SummerFest Festival, assistant conductor of the Opera Company of Boston, conductor of the Kansas City Symphony's summer Family Fare program, and he was music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra for five seasons.  He was the first composer to set the words of Dr. Seuss to music in Green Eggs and Ham. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale and Eastman School of Music, he lives in River Vale, NJ.