In Friday’s (2/21) Arizona Republic, Kerry Lengel reports, “After a two and a half year search, the Phoenix Symphony has named a new music director to define the artistic identity and serve as the public face of the state’s largest performing-arts company. Tito Muñoz, who currently serves as music director of the Opéra National de Lorraine and Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy in France, will take the baton at Phoenix’s Symphony Hall for seven classics concerts in the 2014-15 season. A native of Queens, N.Y., he is 30 years old—the same age as his predecessor, Michael Christie, when Christie came to the Valley in 2004.…[Christie] stepped down last spring after accepting the music-director post at Minnesota Opera.” Muñoz, whose mother and father were immigrants from Ecuador and Colombia, “got an early boost studying at the famed Juilliard School in weekend classes aimed at under-represented minorities.” A graduate of Queens College, he studied at Aspen’s American Academy of Conducting, made his professional conducting debut in 2006 with the National Symphony Orchestra, and spent three years as assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra through the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellows Program.
Posted February 21, 2014
