CATHERINE COMET has held Music Director positions with the Grand Rapids Symphony as well as the American Symphony.
A past recipient of the Seaver/N.E.A. Conductors Award, at the time America’s most prestigious award for orchestral conductors, Catherine Comet completed her twelve-year tenure as Music Director of the Grand Rapids Symphony in the 1997-98 season. She was also Music Director of the American Symphony from 1989-90 through 1991-92. She was Associate Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony from 1984-86, and from the 1981-82 season through 1983-84, she was Associate Conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony.
Prior to her appointment at Saint Louis, Catherine Comet was conductor and music director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, and before that she was conductor of the Ballet Company of the Theatre National de l’Opera de Paris. A native of Paris, Miss Comet studied at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique and at The Juilliard School in New York. Her principal teachers included Igor Markevitch, Pierre Boulez and Jean Fournet.
Catherine Comet has conducted many of North America’s leading orchestras, including the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, National, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, New Jersey, Indianapolis, Detroit, Seattle and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, the Buffalo and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestras, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, to name just a few.
Abroad, she has appeared in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China and Japan, where she conducted the Century Orchestra Osaka as well as the Orchestra of the City of Kitakyushu. In the summer of 1990 she served as the United States’ Resident Conductor of the American/Soviet Youth Orchestra in their second tour of the then Soviet Union as well as Europe and the United States. In Europe she guest conducting in Germany with the orchestras of Bochum, Monchengladbach and Hannover, in Spain with the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, and in France with Ensemble Orchestral de Paris.
Ms. Comet also has appeared at many summer festivals, including the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Wisconsin's Peninsula Festival, the Cabrillo Music Festival, the Interlochen Arts Festival, the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, the Waterloo Music Festival in New Jersey, the Woodstock (IL) Mozart Festival, the Peter Britt Festival in Oregon, The Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, and the Aspen Music Festival.
In her first season with the Grand Rapids Symphony, ASCAP awarded the orchestra first prize for regional orchestras for adventuresome programming in contemporary American music and in her second season, the orchestra was awarded third prize. Catherine Comet and the Grand Rapids Symphony recorded three discs on the Koss Classics label.
Catherine Comet, married to Michael Aiken, retired Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, now make their home in Wyoming. They have one daughter, Caroline.
May 2010
