Theodore Kuchar

Conductor Theodore Kuchar has been active in many countries beyond his native U.S., notably in Ukraine. He is exceptionally prolific as a recording artist, mostly with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. Kuchar was born in 1963 in New York to parents of Ukrainian background. He took up the violin at age ten, switched to viola, and was admitted to the Cleveland Institute of Music in Ohio, where he studied with Robert Vernon. Kuchar graduated in 1982 and soon landed principal viola posts in Cleveland and Helsinki, Finland. He appeared as a soloist in the U.S. (including at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts and the Blossom Music Festival in suburban Cleveland), Europe, Australia, and the former Soviet Union. Concurrently, Kuchar was building a career as a conductor, earning a Boston Symphony Orchestra Paul Fromm Fellowship when he was 20. That allowed him to study with such conducting luminaries as André Previn, Seiji Ozawa, and Leonard Bernstein. Kuchar landed a post as assistant to Lorin Maazel at the Cleveland Orchestra and guest conducted orchestras as far afield as South Africa, Australia, Finland, and the former Czechoslovakia. Kuchar was appointed music director of the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra in Brisbane and the West Australian Ballet in Perth in 1987. He also guest conducted the Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra in 1992, and when the orchestra was renamed the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine in 1994, Kuchar became principal conductor and artistic director. Soon after that, he and the orchestra released a recording of Boris Lyatoshinsky's Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 on the Naxos label. That was the first of more than 140 recordings Kuchar has made, the majority of them on Naxos and many with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. During shortages of musical supplies following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he sometimes brought them from the U.S. When Kuchar left that orchestra in 1999, he was named conductor laureate for life and has continued his association with the group. He served as conductor and music director of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra in Colorado from 1996 to 2006, founded a short-lived Sinfonia of Colorado, and taught at the University of Colorado music school in Boulder. Kuchar served as music director and conductor of the Fresno Philharmonic Orchestra in California from 2002 to 2016 and held the same positions with the Reno Chamber Orchestra from 2003 to 2018. Kuchar was resident conductor at Ohio's Kent/Blossom Music Festival, beginning in 2004, and artistic director of the Nevada Chamber Music Festival, beginning in 2005. He was chief conductor of the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra in Ostrava, Czech Republic, from 2005 to 2012. He also served as artistic director of the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra in the 2010s. In 2022, Kuchar returned to Ukraine, becoming principal conductor of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra, and that year, he took up a new post as professor of orchestral conducting at Houghton University in upstate New York. In 2023, he conducted the Lublin Philharmonic in Poland on the Navona album Rhapsodic: Gershwin, Rachmaninoff with pianist Fanya Lin. ~ James Manheim, Rovi