Behind the Baton

To speak of Gerard Schwarz – musician, conductor, festival organizer, gig hopper, educator, television personality, patron and proselytizer of the arts – is to tell an exemplary American story.

You could convey it exclusively in clichés, from his industrious émigré parents to his precocious childhood, from his ardor and diligence as a prodigy trumpeter to his meteoric rise as a conductor, from his ...