Steven Sloane
Music Director
American-Israeli Steven Sloane has recently been named Music Director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and he continues as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Malmö Opera Sweden.
Maestro Sloane is a visionary whose creative concepts and outstanding artistic merits have garnered respect in artistic circles, as well as in the realm of cultural politics. A student of Eugene Ormandy, Franco Ferrara and Gary Bertini, he quickly set off for an international career and served as Music Director of the Spoleto Festival USA, of Opera North in Leeds, of the American Composers Orchestra, as Principal Conductor of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, as well as Artistic Director of the Cultural Capital of Europe Ruhr.2010. Steven Sloane is a frequent guest with prestigious orchestras, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra London, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
As the long-term General Music Director of the Bochum Symphony, which he transformed into one of Germany’s leading orchestras, Steven Sloane was instrumental in the building and realization of the orchestra’s own music centre, the Anneliese Brost Musikforum Ruhr, he inaugurated the hall in 2016 to international acclaim. Current highlights with the Bochum Symphony include a Ligeti Requiem at the RuhrTriennale Festival 2019, as well as the German Première of David Lang’s new opera Prisoner of the state in May 2020, co-commissioned with the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam’s De Doelen, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bruges’s Concertgebouw and Malmö Opera.
A sought-after opera conductor, Steven Sloane’s engagements have taken him to the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, where he performed Le Nozze di Figaro (Mozart), the Los Angeles Opera, where he conducted Grendel (Elliot Goldenthal), the San Francisco Opera, where he led a production of Bonesetter’s Daughter (Stewart Wallace), the Royal Danish Opera, where he conducted Madama Butterfly (Puccini), the Houston Grand Opera, where he performed The Makropulos Case (Janáček) and Die Zauberflöte (Mozart), the Welsh National Opera, where he conducted Iphigenie en Tauride (Gluck), the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he conducted The Love for Three Oranges (Prokofiev), the Stuttgart Opera, where he presided over a production of Macbeth (Verdi), the Israeli Opera, where he performed The Pearl Fishers (Bizet), the Grand Théâtre de Genève, where he led a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Britten) as well as to many festivals worldwide, conducting Salome (R. Strauss) in Hong Kong, Katja Kabanova (Janáček) in Santa Fe, Genoveva (Schumann) in Edinburgh, Neither (Morton Feldman) in Salzburg, Die Soldaten (Bernd Alois Zimmermann) at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and Anna Nicole (Mark-Antony Turnage) at the NYC Opera. Recent opera appearances include the outstanding Berlin première of Medea (Aribert Reimann) at the Komische Oper Berlin, Adriana Lecouvreur (Francesco Cilea) at the Frankfurt Opera, Der fliegende Holländer (Wagner) at Malmö Opera and Salome (R. Strauss) at the Spoleto Festival USA.
Education and promoting young musicians have always been of great importance to Steven Sloane. He has regularly conducted youth orchestras such as Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Bundesjugendorchester and Young Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and since 2013 has served as professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he has founded the International Conducting Academy Berlin.