William Schrickel has been the Music Director of the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra since 2000. A former Assistant Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, he was also Music Director of the St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra from 2002-2008 and received a prestigious Award for Adventurous Programming from ASCAP and the League of American Orchestras in 2006.
Schrickel’s programs with the MSO survey a huge range of orchestral repertoire, from music of Vivaldi through works composed by some of today’s finest composers, including Polina Nazaykinskaya, Zhou Tian, Dominick Argento, Gunther Schuller, Osvaldo Golijov, and Jocelyn Hagen. He has led performances of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra, the Kenwood Symphony, The Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, and The Musical Offering, and he has conducted five MSO programs featuring the Minnesota Chorale.
Schrickel was twenty years old when he won an audition to become a member of the double bass section of the Minnesota Orchestra. A bass student of Joseph Guastafeste, he attended Northwestern University for three years before joining the Minnesota Orchestra in 1976. He became the orchestra’s assistant principal bassist in 1995 and is currently the acting associate principal. He has appeared as soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra three times under the direction of Leonard Slatkin and Andrew Litton, performing music of Giovanni Bottesini and John Tartaglia.
An active chamber musician, Schrickel recently released Vintage ’88, a CD on Centaur Records comprising chamber works by Peter Schickele, Laura Karpman, and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. He has performed with The Chamber Music Society of Minnesota and The Hill House Chamber Players, and he was a founding member of the Minneapolis Artists Ensemble (MAE), a chamber music group that performed in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center and commissioned seventeen new works over seven seasons. Schrickel has recorded chamber music of Mozart, Hummel, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Libby Larsen, John Tartaglia, Frank Proto, Charles Ives, Michael J. Aubart, Amaral Vieira, David Canfield, and Astor Piazzolla for the GM, Innova, Ten Thousand Lakes, Paulus, and Ars Antiqua labels. He participated for many years in the Minnesota Orchestra’s Adopt-A-School music education program, performing for and speaking to elementary school students to prepare them to attend their first live orchestra concert.