William Fred Scott, Organist/Pianist/Conductor

The musical career of WILLIAM FRED SCOTT has been noted for its variety as well as its vigor.  At the end of the 2019-2020 concert season, this versatile organist/pianist/conductor and vocal coach completed five years as Music Director of “Chanticleer,” a twelve-voice male singing group based in San Francisco. Scott, the fifth music director in that organization’s forty-year history, created and supervised hundreds of concert programs, encompassing well over three hundred different works of music from Hildegard von Bingen’s chants to commissioned works from John Harbison, Nico Muhly, Ricky Ian Gordon, John Musto and Zhou Tian, to name only a few.

Prior to his work with Chanticleer, Scott was a major force in the arts community of Atlanta. Scott has been involved in the Atlanta music scene since 1981, when he was invited by Robert Shaw to join the Atlanta Symphony as Associate Conductor. With that orchestra, Mr. Scott led hundreds of concerts each year in Atlanta and on tour, including children’s concerts, summer concerts at Chastain and Piedmont Parks and the ever-popular Champagne and Coffee series, which he created. On the death of Robert Shaw, Scott was asked to preside over “Christmas with the Atlanta Symphony” concerts in the Shaw tradition which drew consistently sold-out houses. He has conducted a diverse symphonic repertoire and introduced numerous works to Atlanta audiences, including the American premiere of Philip Glass’s “The Canyon.” The roster of soloists who performed with Mr. Scott during his years with the orchestra is an amazing and varied list, including Kiri te Kanawa, Itzhak Perlman, Earl Wild, Ella Fitzgerald, Don McLean and Judy Collins. 

Following his tenure with the orchestra, Scott was Artistic Director of The Atlanta Opera, a post he held for twenty years. During that time the opera company saw unprecedented growth. The company not only purchased and renovated rehearsal and office space in mid-town Atlanta, it carried out a successful capital campaign, staged operas in four different theatres in Atlanta and in Spivey Hall (a yearly staging of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors) and was hailed as one of the “hottest young companies” in the United States. Scott’s operatic repertoire includes the standard operas of Mozart, Verdi, Bizet and Puccini alongside Stephen Paulus’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Blitzstein’s Regina, Floyd’s Susannah, Schuller’s The Fisherman and his Wife, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Britten’s Albert Herring, and Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos and Salome of Richard Strauss. He has conducted The New York City Opera (in New York and on tour in Los Angeles), Opera Carolina, the Opera Company of Boston, Michigan Opera Theatre and Hawaii Opera Theatre. His European debut took place in Prague, conducting Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Mr. Scott is a native of Thomasville, Georgia.  In 1974 he was graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Prior to his move to Atlanta, he served as Assistant Conductor, Chorus Master and Artistic Administrator of The Opera Company of Boston, as led by the redoubtable impresario and conductor Sarah Caldwell. His operatic debut took place in the spring of 1975, leading Beverly Sills and Tatiana Troyanos in Bellini’s rarely-staged The Capulets and the Montagues. He is a frequently sought after writer, lecturer, teacher and adjudicator. In addition to his work in the orchestral field, he has served as Director of Music for the Cathedral of St. Philip, as creator and director of the International Opera Center at Brenau University and as head of the choral music program at The Westminster Schools, Atlanta.  Now busily retired, he divides his time between his home near Atlanta and a cottage near the seashore in Ocean Park, Maine.