Igor Buketoff

Despite his Russian name, Igor Buketoff's biographical and musical pedigrees are thoroughly American -- he born in Connecticut and educated at the University of Kansas, Juilliard, and the Los Angeles Conservatory. He won the first Alice M. Ditson Award for Young Conductors in 1942, and conducted opera and concerts in New York and Indiana in the early 1940s. Until 1964, when he spent a season with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, most of his conducting engagements, including those at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's Young People's Concerts (1948-53), were in the U.S. Since...