“The quintessential L.A. musician of our day.”   – Mark Swed, LA Times

American conductor Anthony Parnther is in his fifth season as Music Director of California’s San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra. As conductor of the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra, whose members hail from leading orchestras nationwide, it was Parnther who led its sold-out Carnegie Hall debut, showcasing the world premiere of I Can by five-time Grammy-winner Jon Batiste. 

A master of multiple genres, Parnther has conducted many of the world’s preeminent artists, from Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, Jessye Norman, and Frederica von Stade to Imagine Dragons, John Legend, Avenged Sevenfold, Wu-Tang Clan, and Rihanna. Upcoming highlights include guest appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Nashville Symphony, and Chineke! Orchestra, with which Parnther recently made his BBC Proms debut in London. Recent engagements include collaborations with the Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Calgary Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Music Academy of the West, National Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and the Sydney Symphony in Australia.

Dedicated to amplifying traditionally underrepresented voices, Parnther has reconstructed and performed orchestral works by Margaret Bonds, Duke Ellington, Zenobia Powell Perry, Florence Price, William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. As well as leading LA Opera’s world premiere of Tamar-kali’s oratorio We Hold These Truths and Long Beach Opera’s revival of Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five, Parnther has premiered and recorded works by Batiste, Kris Bowers, Chanda Dancy, Davis, Adolphus Hailstork, Marian Harrison, Phillip Herbert, Daniel Kidane, Gary Powell Nash, James Newton, Perry, Price, Taylor, George Walker, Errollyn Wallen, James Wilson, and John Wineglass. For his extensive championing of works by Black, Latino, and women composers, Parnther was profiled in 2015 as a “Local Hero” by Los Angeles’s PBS SoCal/KCET.

As one of today’s foremost film conductors, Parnther helms recording sessions for many of the world’s top international feature films and television series, working in close collaboration with some of the most decorated media composers on the scoring stages of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Nashville, Budapest, Glasgow, and London. Recent projects include Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Encanto, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Nope, Creed III, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, Tenet, American Dad!, Oppenheimer, Turning Red, Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Star Wars: Book of Boba Fett, and League of Legends.

© 21C Media Group, October 2023

Photo Credit: Hart Getzen