Conductor Leon Botstein has a long record of championing neglected repertory with the American Symphony Orchestra and many other groups he has led over his career. He is also a noted author and an educator who has created innovative music education programs at Bard College, of which he is president.

Botstein was born on December 14, 1946, in Zurich, Switzerland. His parents were both Polish physicians of Jewish background, and they moved to New York when Botstein was two. He studied violin at New York's High School of Music and Art and over summers in Mexico City. Botstein earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago, majoring in history and philosophy but also serving as concertmaster and assistant conductor of the university orchestra, and he founded a new university chamber orchestra. He took courses with composer Richard Wernick and musicologists H. Colin Slim and Howard Mayer Brown. Botstein moved on to Harvard for graduate studies, taking a history degree but also conducting the Doctors' Orchestra of Boston and the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra. In 1970, he was appointed president of New Hampshire's Franconia College; at 23, he was the youngest college president in history. There, he founded the White Mountain Music Festival, which continues today in modified form.

In 1975, Botstein assumed the presidency of Bard College in New York's Hudson River Valley; he remains in that position as of 2021. There, he founded the Bard Music Festival, which focuses each year on the works of a single composer and entails the publication of musicological research in addition to performances. For a time, his work had a broad academic orientation, but after the death of his young daughter, he returned to music. He took conducting lessons with Harold Farberman and became the principal conductor of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, and in 1992, the American Symphony Orchestra in Washington. The same year, he was named the editor of The Musical Quarterly, one of the leading musicology periodicals in the U.S. At Bard, he founded The Orchestra Now, which he has often conducted. In 2003, he became the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, which he led on tours of the U.S. and Germany; he remains the group's conductor laureate. Botstein has guest conducted the London Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, and many other groups.

Botstein has made more than 25 recordings with various groups on the Telarc, Hyperion, and Bridge labels, as well as many others. Many of them have been devoted to lesser-known composers and works; in 2018, for Hyperion's "Romantic Piano Concerto" series, he and The Orchestra Now backed pianist Piers Lane in an album of works by Beethoven's student Ferdinand Ries. In 2021, Botstein conducted The Orchestra Now with Orion Weiss on the album Piano Protagonists, featuring music by Chopin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Korngold. He is the author of seven books, four of them in German, on music, culture, and Jewish intellectual history. ~ James Manheim, Rovi