MA Top 30 Professional of the Year: Lacey Huszcza

Executive Director, Las Vegas Philharmonic
Former Associate Executive Director, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

The Las Vegas Philharmonic’s brand new executive director (she started December 1) arrives after 13 years with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO), which credits her with raising its profile in a very crowded musical landscape. A horn player with bachelors’ degrees in music and communications, she launched her career with internships in marketing and special events while still a student at the University of Colorado. She joined those departments at LACO in 2005, moving on to become operations and promotions director while completing her MBA from Pepperdine University.

In her 13 years with LACO, Huszca served in almost every department, from development, marketing, and special events to production, operations, and artistic administration. When Rachel Fine stepped down as executive director in January of 2015, the board turned to Huszcza to serve as interim until Scott Harrison’s
arrival later that year. In 2017, she helped then-outgoing Music Director Jeffrey Kahane realize his dream of mounting a Kurt Weill festival, a two-week, city-wide exploration of the power of music to bring people together during fraught times. Titled “Lift Every Voice,” the event put Kahane on the podium at UCLA to conduct Lost in the Stars, Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1950 opera about apartheid, an adaptation of Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country. The production, by Anne Bogart’s New York-based SITI theater company, marked the first in LA since the 1950 tour of the original Broadway production.

And it was Huszcza who spearheaded the LACO’s participation in The Los Angeles Orchestra Fellowship, a collaboration with the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (ICYOLA) and USC Thornton School of Music focused on increasing cultural diversity among orchestra musicians.

Clearly, the 20-year-old Las Vegas Philharmonic has made an inspired choice and will benefit from the connections Huszcza has forged in the field, as well as her skills in development, audience building, and tailoring an organization to respond—and stand out in—its community.