Alastair Willis is the principal conductor of Indiana's South Bend Symphony Orchestra. Raised and trained in various countries, he has a long record as conductor of various orchestras in the U.S. and Europe. Willis was born in Acton, Massachusetts, in 1971. His sister is hornist Sarah Willis, the first female member of the Berlin Philharmonic brass section. Willis' father, David K. Willis, was a journalist who served as Christian Science Monitor bureau chief in Moscow from 1976 to 1981 before the family moved from Moscow to Surrey, England. Alastair attended Bristol University, earning a bachelor's degree with honors, and went on for an education degree at Kingston University in London. Returning to the U.S., Willis earned a master's degree in music at Rice University in Houston, studying conducting with Larry Rachleff. He took further conducting courses at the Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals. He spent a year as an assistant to Cincinnati Symphony conductor Jesús López-Cobos, where he was also the principal conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra and associate conductor of the Cincinnati Pops. He then spent three years as the associate conductor with the Seattle Symphony. His first principal conductor position came with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra. During this period, Willis performed with an unusually long list of ensembles, in both the U.S. and Europe, as a guest conductor; these included the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Several orchestras engaged him multiple times, including Nashville Symphony and the Symphonia Boca Raton in Florida, where Willis became the principal conductor of the orchestra's New Directions series. He also served as the principal guest conductor with the Florida Orchestra’s Coffee Concert series. Willis became the principal conductor of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, where he took up residence and programmed a complete cycle of Beethoven's symphonies over his first years with the ensemble. Willis has made several recordings for the Naxos label. His 2009 recording of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Classical Album that year. In 2020, Willis led the Seattle ensemble Music of Remembrance in a Naxos recording of Tom Cipullo's opera The Parting. ~ James Manheim