Tito Muñoz

A product of New York's public schools, conductor Tito Muñoz has been active in Europe as well as in his native U.S. He is the music director of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra. Muñoz was born on July 14, 1983, in Queens, New York. He began his musical life as a violinist, taking classes at New York's Louis Armstrong Middle School. Muñoz also enrolled in the Juilliard School's Music Advancement program for young people, studying violin with Hisako Resnick and composition with Amanda Harberg. Muñoz attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where he made his first appearance as a conductor in a performance of West Side Story. He also played in the New York Youth Symphony and other groups, took classes at the Manhattan School of Music Pre-College Division, and in summers, attended the Kinhaven Music School in Vermont and the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire. At the French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts in 1999, he conducted several ensembles; the festival hired him back as an instructor in 2001 and 2003. Muñoz did his undergraduate work at Queens College, studying violin with Daniel Phillips but also organizing many student performances as a conductor. In the summers from 2004 to 2006, he attended the American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival and School, studying with David Zinman and Murry Sidlin, and he took master classes from Robert Spano and Leonard Slatkin, among others. Zinman invited him to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra at its summer Blossom Music Festival in 2006; the following year, he became the festival's assistant conductor. Slatkin was also impressed with the young conductor and invited him to lead the National Symphony Orchestra in Copland's Billy the Kid at Washington's Kennedy Center. Muñoz's first professional position came in 2006, when Paavo Järvi appointed him, at age 22, as assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. The following year, he made his debut with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, leading a Celtic Tenors concert. In 2007, he also added the post of assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra to his CV and made his European debut with the Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon-Provence. In 2009, Muñoz made his debut as an opera conductor with the Opéra National de Lorraine and conducted its sister orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy. From 2010 to 2013, he served as music director for both organizations, also serving as music director for New York's Le Poisson Rouge venue. In 2014, Muñoz was named music director of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, succeeding Michael Christie; he continued in that position as of 2022. Often programming contemporary works, Muñoz has particularly championed the music of Michael Hersch. He conducted a 2018 recording of Hersch's End Stages and Violin Concerto, featuring Patricia Kopatchinskaja, for New Focus Recordings and returned on that label in 2022 with a recording of Hersch's The Script of Storms.
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