Multiple Grammy® Award-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta is Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Omaha Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center, and Conductor Laureate of the Hawaii Symphony. Gramophone Magazine has recognized her among the “Fifty Great Conductors” of all time, and ASCAP has hailed her as “a leading force for music of our time.” 

As Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Falletta became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra. She has overseen one of the orchestra’s most productive recording and touring eras, bringing the Philharmonic to an unprecedented level of national and international prominence. The BPO is ranked as one of the top five orchestras of CD releases on international labels and Falletta’s recordings have been streamed over 50 million times on Spotify alone.

JoAnn Falletta has led the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra on major international and US tours, highlighted by their historic 2018 tour to Poland, where the BPO became the first American orchestra to perform at the prestigious Beethoven Festival in Warsaw, as well as six concert tours of Florida and  three performances at Carnegie Hall. 

Falletta’s guest conducting career has taken her to many of the world’s leading orchestras, including over a hundred orchestras in North America across 48 states, Canada, and Mexico. Internationally, she has conducted many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, and South America. She has conducted over 1,700 orchestral works by 650 composers with 200 premieres, including over 135 works by more than 70 women composers.
  
Falletta’s complete discography consists of over 135 titles. Her Grammy® Award-winning albums include the 2021 Grammy® Award with the BPO for Richard Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua, the 2019 Grammy® Award with The London Symphony for the music of Kenneth Fuchs, and two Grammy® awards in 2008 for the recording with the BPO of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan. She has been nominated with four additional Grammy’s including two for Best Orchestral Performance.

Recent releases with the BPO included The French in Spain (Ravel, Ibert and Debussy), Stravinsky Fairy Tales, A Hero’s Life including music of Strauss and the premiere recording of Behzad Ranjbaran’s violin concerto with Nikki Chooi, Beethoven/Hagen, celebrating the BPO’s 90th anniversary, the music of Danny Elfman with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic on Sony, Contemporary Landscapes, with four works commissioned by the BPO, and The Golden Age of the Horn, a disc of concertos for two horns, featuring the principal and associate principal horns of the BPO.

Upcoming recordings on Naxos include Symphonic Dances (Bartok, Copland and Hindemith), Richard Danielpour’s Francis Oratorio, The Spanish in Paris (Falla, Turina and Granados), and on the Beau Fleuve label, American Soundscapes featuring world premiere recordings of the music of Michael Daugherty, Paul Moravec, and Robert Paterson.

Falletta is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has served by Presidential appointment as a Member of the National Council on the Arts, and is the recipient of many of the most prestigious conducting awards. 

After earning her bachelor’s degree at Mannes, Falletta received master’s and doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School. 

For more information, visit www.joannfalletta.com.

Photo credit: Steve J. Sherman