Biography
Stefan Lano was appointed principal conductor of the German National Theatre in Weimar following his internationally feted account on its stage of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (premiered on 21 January 2017). A sought-after interpreter of the music dating from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, he has conducted concert and opera performances alike. Following his extended tenure as the repetiteur at the Wiener Staatsoper, in 1988 Lorin Maazel named him associate conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 1993, Stefan Lano conducted the first Latin American production of Berg’s Lulu at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where later on he was appointed the theatre’s music director. His debut in December 1997 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress) led to an engagement at the San Francisco Opera, where in 1998 he again conducted a production of Berg’s Lulu. In 2002, he was invited by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to conduct concert performances of Berg’s Wozzeck, for which the Conseil Québecoise de la Musique accorded him an OPUS Award for the Best Concert of the Season. In 2003, he received another OPUS Award for his renditions of Albert Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane and Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Further engagements included his guest appearances at the Semperoper Dresden, the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Slovak National Theatre, opera houses in Göteborg, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City and Singapore, where in 2003 he conducted the Singapore Symphony Orchestra during a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot. From 2012 to 2015, he served as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Uruguay in Montevideo. He has maintained his long-standing collaboration with the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and the Argentine National Symphony Orchestra.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, after completing his studies of composition and piano at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Stefan Lano was awarded a full scholarship as Teaching Fellow at Harvard University, from which he holds a PhD in composition. A grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) afforded him the opportunity to continue to study composition with Isang Yun and conducting with Hans Martin Rabenstein at the Universität der Künste Berlin in 1977. Stefan Lano has composed a number of prize-winning works, including symphonies and songs.