“In his second season as music director of New West Symphony, the 34-year-old Brazilian conductor Marcelo Lehninger has not quite yet developed a large presence in Southern California. But he is a conductor on the cusp, beginning to build a strong reputation and getting major assignments,” writes Mark Swed in Thursday’s (3/20) Los Angeles Times. “At the Boston Symphony, where he was originally an assistant conductor to James Levine and is now associate conductor, his renown has risen to the point where he will open the orchestra’s new season in the fall, the week before the BSO’s new music director, Andris Nelsons, arrives. In February, Lehninger made his Chicago Symphony debut as one of the replacements for an ailing, aging Pierre Boulez, who had asked that emerging conductors be the substitutes. … Lehninger’s most ambitious program this season with the New West”—this weekend in three SoCal venues—“will require different skills. It is Verdi’s Requiem.”
Posted March 21, 2014
