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Benjamin Shwartz

Conductor Benjamin Shwartz is known as a champion of contemporary music and innovative multimedia projects. He has found success across Europe as well as in the U.S. Shwartz was born in Los Angeles in 1979. He was raised partly in Israel but returned to the U.S. for musical studies at California's Idyllwild Arts Academy and then at the University of Pennsylvania. For a time, he harbored the ambition to become a composer, studying with James Primosch at Penn and traveling to Germany for further work with Karlheinz Stockhausen, but he pursued parallel studies in conducting at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music with Otto-Werner Mueller, and also took lessons from Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Christoph Eschenbach and composer Ned Rorem. Prizes, including a third-place showing in 2007 at the International Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany, helped his conducting career along, and his interest in new music was stimulated by a stint as a conducting fellow at the New World Symphony. Shwartz served as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2005 to 2009, leading the group on a European tour in 2008. He was also the resident conductor of the main San Francisco Symphony during this period. Shwartz made guest conducting appearances with major American orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and increasingly in Europe, where has conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Iceland Symphony, and the Innsbruck Symphony in Austria. From 2013 to 2016, Shwartz served as the music director of the Wroclaw Philharmonic in Poland, shepherding its move into the city's new National Music Forum. He then became the principal guest conductor of the Duisburg Symphony in Germany in 2019. He has conducted several world or American premieres, including those of works by Mason Bates, Nathaniel Stookey (a cousin of Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary), Tzvi Avni. Shwartz is the creator of the "Mercury Soul" project, in which works by such contemporary composers as Xenakis, Ligeti, and Webern are performed in a nightclub setting with visual arts accompaniment and interludes from a club DJ. He has also led tours of "The Age of Anxiety," a multimedia production on which he collaborated with sculptor, painter, and stage designer Alexander Polzin. Shwartz has made recordings for the BIS, Bridge, and Naxos labels; for the latter, he led the Gulbenkian Orchestra in a recording of works by Vasco Mendonça, in 2019.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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Discography

8 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

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