Philharmonic’s Choice Has Been Performer, Educator

When Dean Corey takes over as executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society in August, the 46-year-old father of two will bring with him a lengthy list of accomplishments as a performer and music educator as well as in the field of arts management.

An Ohio native who grew up in Arlington, Tex., and holds graduate degrees from Yale University, he is director of development for the San Diego Symphony, which has been buffeted in recent years by budget ailments. Corey acknowledges that scaling the orchestra’s budget from $8 million to $6.7 million over the past year made for a “rough ride.” But he said he will look back on it all as “a way to get the music I love to people that might be less familiar with it.”

That love of music first was fostered in a high school band directed by his father (young Corey played French horn) and then at North Texas State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. His years at Yale were marked by not just musical but also political energy, especially heady for a young man raised in the hinterlands.

“That was a great time, the time of Kent State and the Black Panthers, and there was a great deal of good music being produced,” he recalls. “It was a tremendous time, and I still feel fortunate to have been there.”

His next stop was New York City, where he found himself playing Mostly Mozart festivals and Stravinsky tributes, appearing at Lincoln Center and working with Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, Paul Ingraham and the New York City Ballet Orchestra. But he sensed that he was not fulfilling a personal obligation to further his art.

“We were playing this music for people very familiar with it, which was great,” he remembers, “but I felt I had a mission to make other people aware of this music, to introduce it to them so they might love it half as much as I do.”

So in 1972 he left New York and went home to Texas. At 25, he was working in management for a grocery chain.

He kept his hand in music, though, free-lancing until he landed a spot with the Ft. Worth Symphony, arranging contracts and venues for the orchestra’s extensive touring program. He found the business side of music to be more interesting than he had imagined and decided to pursue arts management. The road led to Chattanooga, Tenn., where he spent three years overseeing the merger and operation of the city’s symphony orchestra and opera company.

Corey moved to Florida for two years as executive director of the Jacksonville Symphony, and then north to New York state as president and chief executive officer of the Rochester Philharmonic, which he found more established but--perhaps as a result--less enticing than the younger, growing groups he had worked with.

Seeking another program that seemed to be on the rise, he went to San Diego, arriving just before the recession caught up with the orchestra and forced cutbacks.