"At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel," Leon Botstein once said. Leon Botstein has spent the past 33 proving that he's the exception to the rule. As the president of Bard College since 1975, he has not only remade Bard into one of the country's best liberal arts colleges but also redefined the role of the college president by holding down a second job as music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. This weekend at the Sosnoff Theater at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, he'll be conducting Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, Jean Sibelisu's Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47, and Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30.
