Uri Segal

Uri Segal was born in 1944 in Jerusalem

Uri Segal was born in Jerusalem on 7 March 1944. As a child he studied violin but was drawn to conducting. He played viola in the Gadna orchestra.

He studied at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. From 1966 to 1969 he studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He married Ilana Finkelstein in 1966, and they have three daughters and a son.

In 1969 he won first prize in the Dimitri Mitropoulos Conducting Competition in New York. He then spent a year as Leonard Bernstein's assistant at the New York Philharmonic. In 1973 he made his opera debut in Santa Fe with Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.

He was chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra from 1980 to 1982 and of the Philharmonia Hungarica from 1981 to 1985. He also directed the Israel Chamber Orchestra. In 1990 he founded the Century Orchestra in Osaka and became music director of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, a post he held through 2007.

Until 2004 he was music director of the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky. In 2008 he led the Israeli premiere of Mahler's Das klagende Lied at the Israel Festival. He is a principal guest conductor at the Indiana University music school.