Robert Spano, former music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, has been named music director of Washington National Opera. He will take the post, which has been vacant for six years, in the fall of 2025, and will serve in the interim as music director-designate.
Evan Rogister will continue as the company’s principal conductor through the 2024-25 season.
After concluding a 20-year tenure at the Atlanta Symphony in 2021 (he is now music director laureate), Spano became music director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in Texas. He also serves as music director of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, and as principal conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic during its search for a music director.
A 62-year-old Ohio native who studied at Oberlin Conservatory and the Curtis Institute of Music, Spano was assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the 1990s and was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 1996 to 2004. He also taught at Oberlin and ran the conservatory’s Opera Theater program.
In Atlanta, Spano introduced and recorded a number of works by Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golijov, Christopher Theofanidis, Michael Gandolfi and other contemporary composers. At the Metropolitan Opera, he conducted the US premiere of Nico Muhly’s “Marnie.”
“Part of our mission as a national opera company is about shaping the future of the art form,” Timothy O’Leary, Washington National Opera’s general director, tells Michael Andor Brodeur, The Washington Post’s music critic. “And [Spano] has really kind of been personified by this gift for leading new works and giving them life.”
Brodeur’s interview with Spano:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/02/06/robert-spano-music-director-wno/
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