Sergiu Comissiona

Fifteen years in Baltimore, from 1969 to 1984, turned a respectable regional orchestra into one with an international discography and a European touring record, and that tenure is the achievement by which he is usually measured. Comissiona was born in Bucharest in 1928, began the violin at five and was conducting at seventeen; he worked with the Romanian national opera until 1959, then left for Israel, where he led the Haifa Symphony until 1966 and founded the Ramat Gan Chamber Orchestra. Gothenburg had him from 1966 to 1977, the Ulster Orchestra for the single season of 1968–69, the RTVE Symphony in Madrid from 1990 to 1998, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Houston and Vancouver in between. He was a persistent advocate of composers outside the standard lists: his 1968 revival of Langgaard's Music of the Spheres, unheard for forty-six years, effectively began that composer's rediscovery, and he took up Allan Pettersson on the same principle. From 1997 he conducted the symphony orchestra of the USC Thornton School of Music and taught young conductors there. He died in Oklahoma City in 2005. He had played in the Romanian State Ensemble before taking up the baton, and he took American citizenship in 1976. A national competition attached to the Baltimore Symphony was one of the means by which he brought on young conductors.