(Nashville, Tenn. – May 16, 2022) The Nashville Symphony is thrilled to announce the addition of two new musicians to the orchestra, following successful auditions for their positions earlier this year.
Hailing from Mississauga, Canada, William Franklyn Leathers will join the Nashville Symphony as Principal Trumpet at the start of the 2022/23 concert season, beginning on Sept. 10, 2022. Leathers has been noted for “the sparkling clarity” of his trumpet solos and has performed across Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and the Caribbean, earning awards and accolades. Excelling at music from a very young age, the 21-year-old Leathers won his first piano competition before his fifth birthday. At 12 years old, he became the youngest trumpeter accepted into both the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra and the Mississauga Symphony Youth Orchestra. As the fourth Canadian classical trumpeter to attend The Juilliard School, William is currently a protégé of both Christopher Martin and Raymond Mase.
Leathers has performed with the combined orchestra of The Royal Academy and Juilliard, in which he played Principal Trumpet at BBC Proms in 2019, and with The Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2020, where he played Principal Trumpet in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. He also serves as a substitute trumpeter for the New York City Ballet and as a substitute in the Broadway musical The Music Man. A member of the Brass22 quintet, he has also performed with the American Brass Quintet, the New York Philharmonic Holiday Brass, and the Rodney Marsalis Philadelphia Big Brass. Leathers is a member of The National Brass Ensemble, which is comprised of the finest brass players in major orchestras across the United States.
Currently in the last year of his undergraduate studies at Juilliard, Leathers is the proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship, the inaugural Fendi Vanguard Award, and a 2021 Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Award. His commitment to furthering his musical education continues as he has also been accepted into the accelerated BM/ MM program at The Julliard School.
Renee Ann Pflughaupt joins the Nashville Symphony as Principal Librarian this month and assumes her duties on May 16, 2022. Prior to joining the Nashville Symphony, she was head librarian of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra for two seasons, from 2020 to 2022, and head and associate head librarian of the Brevard Music Center in 2021 and 2019, respectively. She was assistant librarian of the National Symphony Orchestra in early 2020. During the 2018-19 seasons, she was personnel manager of the Omaha Symphony in addition to working in the music library. Prior to Omaha, she was orchestra manager and librarian of Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Pflughaupt is currently chair of the social media committee for MOLA: An Association of Music Performance Librarians and has previously written for Marcato, the quarterly journal for MOLA. A classically trained clarinetist and Nebraska native, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Clarinet Performance and a Bachelor of Journalism, News-Editorial from the University of Nebraska‒Lincoln.
About Nashville Symphony
The GRAMMY® Award-winning Nashville Symphony has earned an international reputation for its innovative programming and its commitment to performing, recording and commissioning works by America’s leading composers. With more than 140 performances annually, the orchestra offers a broad range of classical, pops, jazz and family concerts, along with an extensive array of education and community engagement programs. The Nashville Symphony has released 40 internationally distributed recordings on Naxos, which have received 27 GRAMMY® nominations and 14 GRAMMY® Awards, making it one of the most active recording orchestras in the country. The orchestra has also released recordings on Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and New West Records.
In addition to support from Metro Arts and Tennessee Arts Commission, Nashville Symphony is being supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number SLFRP5534 awarded to the State of Tennessee by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Nashville Symphony is also supported in part by an American Rescue Plan Act grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support general operating expenses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
