Our Conductor
David Van Alstyne was born, in 1947, in New Haven, Connecticut and grew up in Los Angeles, California.
In school orchestras and bands he played piano, percussion, tuba, French horn, cello, and string bass.
He had several friends and acquaintances within the local Hollywood culture and was in the marching band in the Warner Brothers film, “The Music Man.”
He traveled a great deal with his family. At age 15, as his father taught American law at the 1962 Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, he lived for the summer in the same Salzburg lake-side palace where the movie “The Sound of Music” was to be filmed soon afterwards.
In Austria and Germany he was deeply affected by the many iconic places and relics from Adolf Hitler’s relatively recent Third Reich, as well as by going into Communist East Germany and through the Berlin Wall on the blood-soaked first anniversary of its construction.
During high school, as a pianist he performed often in the Los Angeles area and received a rich musical heritage studying with Michael Cannon and Gwendolyn Lund.
David became an Applied Organ Performance major at BYU, studying with Parley Belnap and J.J. Keeler. On his LDS mission in London, England, he was asked to give a five-month series of daily organ recitals in the church’s Hyde Park Chapel.
Back home again, aged 22 and married with two adopted sons, David studied further with Belnap and with Salt Lake Tabernacle Organists Alexander Schreiner and Robert Cundick. He also studied composition briefly with Leroy Robertson, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and principally with Alexei Haieff who had been a personal friend and protégé of Igor Stravinsky. After receiving a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Utah in 1971, he did some short but very significant private piano studies with Gladys Gladstone.
In 1972, he moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to help care for his terminally ill father-in-law. While there, he taught at the Ulster College of Music and at the Hopewell Middle School. He was also accepted for post-graduate work at Queen’s University, but finding his family surrounded by sectarian violence and indiscriminate murder, which was then at its peak in Belfast, he moved his family back to Salt Lake City in 1973.
His pursuit of a Master’s Degree at the University of Utah was cut short in 1974 by the beginning of a 34-year career with Ballet West, where he played piano for their classes and rehearsals and accompanied performances as a soloist on stage and in the pit. He was also their Associate Conductor for 25 years.
In developing as a conductor, his most important close associations were with Varujan Kojian (who had held conducting posts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, the Royal Opera in Stockholm, and was Music Director of the Utah Symphony and Music Director of Ballet West) and with Terence Kern (who had conducted orchestras all over the world as Music Director of the Royal Scottish Ballet, the Royal Festival Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, and Ballet West).
David performed on the piano with Ballet West at major venues in Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Tempe, Albuquerque, Aspen, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, West Palm Beach, Raleigh, Washington, D.C. and New York City.
He also conducted ballets with the Utah Symphony, the Utah Chamber Orchestra, the Anchorage Philharmonic, the Spokane Symphony, the Portland Symphony, the Billings Philharmonic, the Boise Philharmonic, the San Jose Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the San Antonio Symphony and the resident orchestra at Wolf Trap, near Washington, D.C.
In 1997, he began conducting the New American Philharmonic. He also pursues strong interests in teaching, performing and composing.
David has two sons, David and Alexander, one beautiful and intelligent granddaughter, Laylah, and resides in Salt Lake City with his wife, Annie.
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