Tara Simoncic
Tara Simoncic was appointed Music Director of the Norwalk Youth Symphony in 2009 and has been the conductor of the Principal Orchestra since 2001.
Originally from Stockton, California, Ms. Simoncic grew up in a musical family. Her father a composer and her mother a flautist, Tara was encouraged to study several instruments at an early age, but chose to focus on the trumpet at the age of six. Tara was bitten by the conducting bug while she was pursuing her Bachelor of Music degree in trumpet performance at the New England Conservatory of music. There, she founded the Stravinsky Septet, an ensemble which toured New England with a staged production of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat and other works with similar instrumentation that were commissioned by the ensemble. Deciding to further her studies in conducting, Ms. Simoncic received her Masters of Music degree in orchestral conducting from Northwestern University. Soon after, she won the position of assistant conductor with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, a one-year position during which time she covered subscription concerts and conducted the orchestras pops, run-out and chamber orchestra concerts and was the conductor of the Knoxville Symphony Youth Orchestra.
In 2000, Ms. Simoncic was accepted into the doctoral program in conducting at the University of Kansas City, Missouri and appointed assistant conductor of the Kansas City Ballet but declined the position to be one of two students accepted into the first conducting class at the Manhattan School of Music. Since then, she has become one of the most active conductors of her generation in the New York area, working with the Brooklyn, Kingsborough, New Amsterdam and Greenwich Symphony Orchestras and the Bergen Philharmonic. Ms. Simoncic served on the conducting faculty at the C.W. Post Music Festival (Long Island) for three years, and has been a guest conductor at the Kinhaven Summer School of Music (Vermont). An advocate of contemporary music, Ms. Simoncic has worked with the Manhattan School of Music Composers Orchestra and was appointed conductor of the Flexible Orchestra in 2004.
Her conducting training extends to Europe, where she has studied extensively in master classes at the Canford Summer School of Music (England) and with the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic (Czech Republic), the West Bohemian Symphony Orchestra (Czech Republic), the Adygeya Republic National Symphony Orchestra and the Astrakhan Symphony Orchestra (Russian Republic), where she has recently been invited back as a guest conductor. She has studied with Zdenec Macal, David Gilbert, Iloh Yang, Victor Yampolsky, George Manahan, George Hurst and Kirk Trevor.