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About Andreas Delfs
Hometown
Flensburg, Germany
Born
1959
Genre
Classical
Winning a long string of adulatory reviews in the process, conductor Andreas Delfs raised the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra from a creditable ensemble to a superlative one. With imaginative programming, he drew ever-larger audiences to Milwaukee's Uihlein Hall, selling out an unprecedented 40 concerts during the 2000 to 2001 season. Considered one of the world's finest among his generation of conductors, Delfs was also engaged as the music director of the prestigious Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Delfs was born in Flensburg, Germany, on August 30, 1959, and was something of a prodigy. He began studying piano and theory at age five and joined the Flensburg Stadttheater as a conductor and composer when he was 17. At the Hamburg Conservatory, he studied with conductors Aldo Ceccato and Christoph von Dohnányi and held the post of staff conductor at the Luneburg Stadttheater. Shortly after, he became a musical assistant at the Hamburg Staatsoper and the music director of the Hamburg University Orchestra. After graduating from Hamburg Conservatory in 1981, Delfs followed the advice of Dohnányi and traveled to New York to study at the Juilliard School of Music. After winning the Bruno Walter Memorial Scholarship, Delfs received his master's degree in 1984.
Delfs credits include both symphonic performance and opera house music directorships. He served as the music director at the Bern Opera, then as the resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and from 1986 through 1995, as the music director of the Orchestre Suisse des Jeunes. In Europe, Delfs was much-in-demand as a guest conductor, leading such ensembles as the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Netherlands Philharmonic, the Leipzig Radio Orchestra, and Zurich's Tonhalle Orchestra, among others. During a tour of France and Spain with the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival Orchestra, Delfs was invited by the tour's soloist, Mstislav Rostropovich, to lead the Moscow Conservatory Orchestra for the opening concert at the Evian Festival's new concert hall in France.
In the realm of opera, Delfs has been applauded for his work in both Europe and America. At the New York City Opera, his conducting of a production of Carmen was much praised by critics and audiences alike, as were productions of Puccini's Il Trittico and Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro mounted at the Aspen Music Festival. In Europe, he has conducted Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini at Sweden's Royal Opera House and a memorable production of the uncut edition of Henze's König Hirsch at Stuttgart. In Bern, he led the Swiss premiere of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, eliciting a strong commendation from the composer. Delfs became the music director of the Milwaukee Symphony in 1997, remaining in that position until 2009 when he was named the conductor laureate. For the first few years of his Milwaukee tenure, Delfs divided his time between America and Hannover, Germany, where he was the music director general of both the Staatsoper and the orchestra from 1996-2000. During his years at Hannover, Delfs conducted the European premiere of John Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles and directed a celebrated production of The Greek Passion by Bohuslav Martinù. In 1999, Delfs led the Milwaukee Symphony in the first Cuban performances by an American orchestra in 37 years, attracting widespread attention in the general American press in addition to receiving outstanding reviews by critics who followed the tour. Delfs also served as the music director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from 2001 to 2004, the principal conductor of the Honolulu Symphony from 2007 to 2010, and he has held the post of music director of the Temple University Symphony Orchestra since 2015. ~ Erik Eriksson
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