Robert Mandell

Robert Mandell born in New York City, ( August 22, 1929 - April 25, 2020) was an international conductor. While American, he is noted in the United Kingdom for his popular family concerts, young people's concerts, and stage musicals In 1955, Mandell was appointed the special music assistant to Bernstein for a series of television specials he created for the Ford Foundation's sponsored arts program, Omnibus, on CBS. In 1956, Mandell founded the Ars Nova Ensemble, with whom he began to perform an annual series of concerts at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York City. His Ars Nova 1956 recording of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, one of the earliest to employ stereo technology, has been re-released after 50 years. That same year he was appointed music director of the York Symphony Orchestra in York, Pennsylvania. In 1957, Bernstein appointed Mandell to become part of the creative team for his newly planned televised Young People's Concerts. In 1958, Mandell was also named music director of the Philadelphia Little Symphony, with whom he performed with both in Philadelphia and New York, and the Westchester Symphony in Westchester County, New York. Between 1955 and 1967, Mandell was executive music director of the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts. Between 1961 and 1968, he recorded over 50 LP discs in London for Readers Digest Records under a variety of pseudonyms, including Eric Hammerstein, Johnny Gibbs, Ray Thomas, Juan Ramirez, Pablo Mendez, Dick Mahi, The Button-Down Brass, The Romantic Saxophones and Strings, and The Collegians. In 1968 Mandell took up residency with his family in England. He concentrated his career initially in musical theater and then on bringing popular classical concerts to a new audience through his "Concerts for the Family" series. In 1972, Mandell became the music director for the Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse musical The Good Old Bad Old Days, which ran for 309 performances at London's Prince of Wales Theatre. In 1973 Mandell became executive music director at the city of Leicester's newly opened Haymarket Theatre, which launched a number of major international revivals of musicals such as Joseph and The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Cameron Mackintosh’s tour of Oliver!, prior to its London West End opening. From 1974, Mandell designed musical entertainments for the concert hall. In 1975, Mandell began what became a regular series of guest tenures with The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to promote a new series of "Concerts for the Family" and young people’s concerts. After acquiring a major classical theatrical and light entertainment music library of over 1,000 orchestrations in 1976 from the estate of the British composer and arranger George Melachrino, Mandell launched a national family concert program conducting a reestablished Melachrino strings and orchestra ensamblee, with whom he toured the UK nationally annually until 2000. In May 2012, Mandell published an extended musical memoir of Bernstein, entitled West Side Maestro.