Conductor RICK BENJAMIN has built a singular career upon the discovery and performance of American music from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Mr. Benjamin first came to public attention in 1985, when he rescued from an abandoned warehouse the orchestra music archive of the legendary Victor Talking Machine Company. This remarkable collection of nearly four thousand orchestral pieces (circa 1870s – 1920s) includes lost scores by luminaries such as Scott Joplin, Edward MacDowell, W.C. Handy, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, and seven hundred other American composers. After recording many of his newfound treasures (in collaboration with multi-Grammy winning producer Thomas Frost), in 1988 Mr. Benjamin made his formal debut at Alice Tully Hall, producing and conducting Lincoln Center’s first all-ragtime concert. 

        Today, Mr. Benjamin is regarded as a leading conductor of historic American music, and he remains the most active figure in this field. His extraordinary nine thousand-title collection of American orchestral music is the basis of his concerts with the Irish National Orchestra (Dublin), Denmark's Aalborg and Aarhus Symfoniorkesters, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the Olympia Symphony (Washington State), and the Erie Philharmonic. In addition, for the past twenty three years Mr. Benjamin has led his own noted repertory ensemble - the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra - in thousands of concerts at arts centers including the Ravinia Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, Chautauqua, New York’s 92nd Street “Y,” and Austria's Brucknerhaus, as well as in historic theaters and movie “palaces” across forty eight U.S. states and several countries overseas.

        In 1992 Mr. Benjamin was appointed an official “Ambassador of Goodwill” to the World’s Fair in Seville, Spain. At the U.S. Pavilion there he produced and conducted dozens of all-American concerts for hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world. More recently, Mr. Benjamin’s programs served as the inspiration for a new dance suite by legendary choreographer Paul Taylor. The resulting work, Oh, You Kid!, received its world premiere at The Kennedy Center with Mr. Benjamin and his Orchestra performing with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. This sold-out engagement was followed by equally successful performances across America and around the world. Oh, You Kid! was again revived by the Taylor Company at New York's City Center in March, 2006. 

        A pioneering researcher of music for silent films, Rick Benjamin continues to search far and wide for the original orchestral accompaniments to motion pictures from the early days of the U.S. film industry. Over the years he has acquired the music libraries of several noted theaters and early cinema conductors, building a personal collection of nearly a thousand period orchestral film scores which are used for his popular programs underscoring classic films of the 1910s and ‘20s.

q            In addition to his full-time duties as Director of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, Mr. Benjamin leads a multifaceted career as a musicologist and historian. His articles have appeared in many publications, and his lecture tours take him to more than one hundred colleges and universities throughout North America. Mr. Benjamin leads a varied professional life, acting as arranger, pianist, musical consultant, and conductor for theatrical productions, motion pictures, radio, and television. In June of 2003 his five-year reconstruction of the Scott Joplin opera Treemonisha was premiered at San Francisco’s Stern Grove Festival to considerable acclaim. Since then the opera has toured in the United States and was premiered by the Cape Town Opera in South Africa in the spring of 2006. It is currently being produced in an adaptation by Opera Memphis.

         Highlights of Rick Benjamin's season includes a the release of his world-premier recordings of the original orchestrations of George M. Cohan's Broadway shows (Your A Grand Old Rag, New World Records 80685-2), feature stories on his career in the Wall Street Journal and Fanfare magazine (cover story), and return appearances with PRO at Chautauqua and for the Minnesota Orchestra's "Pops" series. On television, his musical score for the 1914 Chaplin film The Rounders was broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies network; his music was also featured recently in the PBS-Television programs America’s First River (Bill Moyers) and Greetings from Asbury Park.  q

        Rick Benjamin was educated at The Juilliard School in New York City. 

Recordings:

New World Records, Vanguard, Dorian, Newport Classic, and Rialto labels.