Michelle Merrill, a conducting protégée of Paul Phillips at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, has been named assistant conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Merrill gave a most impressive performance last March as a late replacement for Phillips in Shostakovich’s fearsomely difficult Fourth Symphony. “Amazingly,” I wrote in a review, “Merrill made all this seem organic, even inevitable. With a sure command of scale and structure, she managed transitions with cool assurance, yet gave the music room to stretch when needed.”
Merrill, 30, holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees from SMU,.