The conductor
Steven Fox has specialized in music of the Baroque and -- unusually for an American -- in Russian choral music. As director of New York's
Clarion Choir, he has unearthed, performed, and recorded works little known even in Russia. He should not be confused with the California-based orchestral conductor Steven Allen Fox.
Steven Fox was born in New York on June 13, 1978. He attended the private Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where one of his music teachers was composer
Johannes Somary.
Fox attended Dartmouth College, majoring in Music and Russian, and went on for an MMus degree at the Royal Academy in London, where he graduated with honors and awards. Traveling to Russia, he founded the Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, perhaps Russia's first period-instrument group. With that ensemble he fostered the performance of 18th century music from Russia and its region that had been neglected even in Russia, including the modern premiere of a Symphony in C major by Maksym Berezovsky, the earliest known symphony by a Ukrainian composer, and Dmitri Bortnyansky's final opera, Le fils rival, which he conducted at the Hermitage Theater in 2004.
Fox has been active as a guest conductor in both West and East. He has led the Baroque-oriented
Handel and Haydn Society choir in Boston and the
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Francisco, as well as mainstream groups such as the
Quebec Symphony Orchestra, the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, the
New York City Opera (of which he was associate conductor from 2008 to 2013), and the
Metropolitan Opera in its young artists' program. In Vilnius, Lithuania, he conducted a performance of Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, and in 2016-2017 he conducted a new production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Quebec Opera.
Fox's most sustained activities have been as director of New York's Clarion Music Society period-instrument orchestra and
Clarion Choir, a position he assumed in 2006. With those groups he has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among other New York venues, in not only Baroque music, such as that of Italian Jewish Baroque composer Salomone Rossi, but also in mainstream repertory. In 2016 the choir and orchestra performed the rarely heard Passion Week of Lithuanian composer Maximilian Steinberg, following it up with another ambitious Russian work, Alexander Kastalsky's Memory Eternal, in 2018. These recordings were released on the Naxos label. In 2017, he became director of the Washington, D.C. Cathedral Choral Society.
Fox has also taught at Dartmouth, Yale, the Juilliard School, and the State University of New York, Purchase College.