Steven Sloane

American conductor Steven Sloane is a versatile visionary. His extraordinary creative concepts have won him authority and respect both in artistic circles and in the realm of cultural politics.

Sloane, a former student of Eugene Ormandy, Franco Ferrara and Gary Bertini, is currently head conductor of two dynamic ensembles. As Music Director of the Bochumer Symphoniker, a position he has held since 1994, he transformed the ensemble into the leading orchestra of the German Ruhrgebiet region. His work has been honoured with considerable private donations, which will allow Bochum to begin construction of a new concert hall in 2009.

Since the 2007/2008 season, Steven Sloane has also been head conductor of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. The start of his tenure there coincides with a time of exciting cultural change - Stavanger is European Cultural Capital for 2008, the orchestra will see a notable increase in size, and in 2010 Steven Sloane and the Stavanger Symphony will move to a new concert hall.

One of Steven Sloane's strengths lies in his original program concepts, which have twice won him the highly competitive title "Best Concert Programme of the Season" from the Deutscher Musikverleger-Verband. His Mahler-Ives cycle with the Bochumer Symphoniker in the new Philharmonie Essen drew particular attention. As one of the artistic directors of "Ruhr 2010", Steven Sloane is responsible for program planning for the Cultural Capital Year 2010 in the Ruhrgebiet region.

With a well-developed sensibility for working with voices, Steven Sloane is also a popular opera conductor. He has been music director of the Spoleto Festival (1996-2000) and artistic director of Opera North in Leeds (1999-2003), where he conducted rarely performed works such as Shostakovich's operetta Cheryomushki or Schumann's Genoveva in addition to repertoire pieces like Tosca, Falstaff, or Tristan und Isolde. He has conducted at houses such as Covent Garden (Le nozze di Figaro), the Deutsche Oper Berlin (Das schlaue Füchslein), the Houston Grand Opera (The Makropoulos Affair) as well as at festivals in Hong Kong (Salome) and Santa Fé (Katja Kabanova). In September 2008, Steven Sloane conducted the world premiere of Stewart Wallace's Bonesetter's Daughter at the San Francisco Opera.

Steven Sloane has always worked to promote contemporary music, in particular in his role as music director of the American Composers Orchestra (2002-2006), where he led the premieres of many new compositions at New York's Carnegie Hall. In 2006 he premiered Elliot Goldenthal's opera Grendel at the Los Angeles Opera, with which he also opened New York's Lincoln Center Festival in the same year. In 2008 he returned to the Lincoln Center Festival with successful performances of the spectacular RuhrTriennale production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera Die Soldaten with the Bochumer Symphoniker.

Steven Sloane has worked with leading orchestras since the very start of his career, also in Israel, where he lived beginning in 1981. In 1988 he became first Kapellmeister of the Oper Frankfurt, in 1990 regular conductor of the New York City Opera and in 1992 music director of the Long Beach Opera in Los Angeles. As a guest conductor, he regularly conducts international orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra London, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Chicago Symphony Orchestra.