JAMES GAFFIGAN
CONDUCTOR
“Gaffigan is one of the rising stars of his generation.”
“Gaffigan and his ensemble, which plays with rich tone and a winning sense of dialogue, bring terrific purpose and style. Gaffigan and the LSO do themselves proud.”
Recognized worldwide for his natural ease and extraordinary collaborative spirit, American conductor James Gaffigan has attracted international attention for his prowess as a conductor of both symphony orchestras and opera. The mutual trust he builds with artists empowers them to cultivate the highest art possible.
Gaffigan is uniquely positioned with Music Directorships at two international opera houses. He is the General Music Director of Komische Oper Berlin, a post that commences this 2023/2024 season, and is in his third season as Music Director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, where he led widely acclaimed productions of Wozzeck, La Bohème and Tristan und Isolde. He additionally serves as Music Director of the Verbier Festival Junior Orchestra, where he champions the education of promising young musicians. The 2022/23 season marked Gaffigan’s final season as Principal Guest Conductor of both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera. In 2021, Gaffigan finished his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, a position he held for 10 years, where he raised the orchestra’s international profile with highly successful recordings and tours abroad.
Gaffigan is in high demand with leading orchestras and opera companies throughout North America and Europe. In the 2023/24 season, he returns to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony, where he leads a concert production of Cavalleria Rusticana. In Summer 2023, Gaffigan leads the Metropolitan Opera in their production of La Bohème, as well as the Orchestra de Paris with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Verbier Festival Junior Orchestra.
In his first season as General Music Director of the Komische Oper Berlin, Gaffigan will lead productions of Eugene Onegin, The Golden Cockerel, Der Fliegende Holländer and Le Nozze Di Figaro during the 2023/24 season. Committed to building and investing in young audiences, and presenting unflinchingly relevant and inclusive programming, Gaffigan will also lead Komische Oper in special programming for children throughout the season.
Recent orchestral appearances include London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Wiener Symphoniker, Münchner Philharmoniker, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Norske Opera and Ballet, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Staatskapelle Berlin, Czech Philharmonic and Luzerner Symphonieorchester. In North America, Gaffigan regularly works with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Symphony Orchestra, among others.
A regular at the Metropolitan Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, and Opéra National de Paris, Gaffigan has also conducted the Zürich Opera, Vienna Staatsoper, Staatsoper Hamburg, Dutch National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Santa Fe Opera.
Gaffigan was first prize winner of the 2004 Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition, which opened Europe’s doors to him as a young American. In 2009, he completed a three-year tenure as Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, a position created for him by Michael Tilson Thomas. Prior to that, he was Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, where he worked with Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. Gaffigan is an alumnus of the Aspen Music Festival’s Aspen Conducting Academy and the Tanglewood Music Center.
Passionate about music education and a product of the New York City public school system, Gaffigan grew up in New York City and studied at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art before pursuing his conducting studies. He believes that access to music education is the method by which America’s concert halls will finally begin to reflect our community and shrink the racial and gender gaps that exist in performing arts today.
Born in 1994 in Seoul, Seong-Jin Cho started learning the piano at 6 and gave his first public recital at age 11. In 2009, he became the youngest-ever winner of Japan’s Hamamatsu International Piano Competition. In 2011, he won Third Prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the age of 17. In 2012, he moved to Paris to study with Michel Béroff at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique from which he graduated in 2015. He is now based in Berlin.
“Gaffigan flaunted an unbridled enthusiasm in Thursday’s program. He also showed an exacting dedication to music-making. Conducting at times with his eyes closed, lovingly shaping phrases with cradled arms, he brought out the tenderness and delicacy of Beethoven’s orchestration. As the music turned stormy, the ensemble didn’t round the edges of thunderous, booming passages, giving articulated notes a stalactite edge.”
#1 of Top 10 Performances of 2019: “The Lyric Opera of Chicago delivered a Don Giovanni for the ages in November. Rarely will one experience as stellar an ensemble lineup in this notoriously hard-to-cast opera, all working together seamlessly and delivering the cynical humor as well as the moral twilight of Mozart’s dramma giocoso with equal relish. Robert Falls’ fluent, stylish staging remains theatrical titanium and James Gaffigan delivered a seminar in Mozart opera conducting, just as he did with Lyric’s Così fan tutte in 2018.”
“James Gaffigan’s conducting is simply terrific—big in character and bringing out all of the drama and humor of Mozart’s glorious score with the Lyric Opera Orchestra.”
“Gaffigan offered an intense, full-throated reading, with an emphasis on galvanic fortissimos, fiercely stated string playing and extreme dynamic contrasts. He seemed intent on keeping the music moving along, especially in the enormous first movement, but he did not sacrifice the profundities of its final pages.
“Gaffigan’s career is clearly ascendant, with performances already under his belt at the Met Opera, Chicago’s Lyric, and major orchestras on both sides of the pond. His work with the CSO seemed authoritative and collegial, his sensibility for the music of his own generation readily apparent.”
“Under Gaffigan’s direction, the outlasting Debussy work — La Mer — was magnificent. Fineness and strenuousness balanced beautifully, the instrumental balance itself supporting every gesture. The final effect was like that of a pointillist painting — impressive whether seen from a distance or up close, at the level of a speck.”
“Deborah Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, sees big things coming for the 38-year-old conductor James Gaffigan, who just led the orchestra in its annual tour of the city’s parks. In 2015, he impressed me enormously when he led the Philharmonic in the crackling premiere of Andrew Norman’s fantastical ‘Split,’ a breathless fantasy for piano and orchestra.
Mr. Gaffigan has also won praise for his approach to the standard repertory. He ended the Philharmonic’s concert last week in Central Park with a colorful account of a piece I never tire of: Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade.’ Here he leads an uncommonly dramatic account of Mozart’s Requiem, recorded in 2017 with the Orchestre National de France at the Basilica of St. Denis in the Paris suburbs. Let’s hope the future Ms. Borda envisions for him regularly includes the New York Philharmonic.”
“A 38-year-old native New Yorker — from Staten Island, which is, alas, the only borough to get an indoor chamber concert, on June 17, rather than the full park treatment — Mr. Gaffigan is one of the rising stars of his generation. Deborah Borda, the New York Philharmonic’s chief executive, said in an interview: “He’s energetic, he’s a very affable presence on and off the podium, and I think he has an ability to give enthusiasm for a wide variety of music.”
His recordings with the Lucerne Symphony, where his contract extends until 2021, are vibrant and beautifully played. (I particularly relish a glowing but fierce account of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6 and American Suite.) A Philharmonic concert he led in 2015 — featuring the premiere of an Andrew Norman piano concerto, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel — was a programming model, a study in musical tricksterism through the ages that gave a new work a brilliantly apt context.”
“I think communicating music is, of course, important but bringing people together and getting people to move together and breathe together is a beautiful job. I love my job, but it’s hard to put into words what it is we do up there but at the end of the day it’s bringing people together and whatever language they speak or whatever place they’re from, somehow we’re all coming together and doing the same piece of music in a very united fashion.”
“Gaffigan and his ensemble, which plays with rich tone and a winning sense of dialogue, bring terrific purpose and style. Gaffigan and the LSO do themselves proud.”