Biography

Recipient of Aspen Music Festival’s 2010 James Conlon Conducting Prize, Daniel Stewart is Music Director of the Santa Cruz Symphony. He has conducted the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Houston Symphony, Saint Louis Symphony, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Frankfurt Opera-Orchestra, and the Boston Ballet. He joins the San Francisco Symphony as Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) in the 2019-20 season.

In 2012, the Metropolitan Opera appointed Mr. Stewart the first conductor of their Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. In 2013, he made his Lincoln Center debut in a Metropolitan Opera produced concert of comic operas by Stravinsky, Mozart, Donizetti, and Berlioz. During his tenure with the Metropolitan Opera, he studied with then-music director James Levine, coached singers, and conducted the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and soloists in a comprehensive range of the operatic repertory, including scenes from Norma, Benvenuto Cellini, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, L'elisir d'amore, Don Pasquale, Pagliacci, Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflöte, Il barbiere di Siviglia, L’italiana in Algeri, Ariadne auf Naxos, The Rake’s Progress, Simon Boccanegra, La traviata, Otello, Falstaff, Der Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Tristan und Isolde, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.

Mr. Stewart and the Santa Cruz Symphony have performed with Yuja Wang, more than twenty principal singers from the Metropolitan Opera, established a thriving chamber music series, and expanded educational outreach programs. He has worked closely with contemporary composers such as the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, Esa-Pekka Salonen, HK Gruber, John Adams, and Thomas Adès, whom he assisted in preparing the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Aspects of Adès festival in 2011. An avid composer himself, Mr. Stewart's compositions have been performed at the Aspen Music Festival, Tribeca New Music Festival, and Verbier Festival.

Mr. Stewart is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied conducting with Otto-Werner Mueller, with additional studies with Simon Rattle, Christoph Eschenbach, and Alan Gilbert. Previously a member of the SFSYO, he has also concertized frequently as a viola soloist, and served as principal violist of numerous ensembles, including the New World Symphony (while also studying conducting with Michael Tilson Thomas), Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra, and the Verbier Festival and Chamber Orchestras. He has performed as a violist with the San Francisco Symphony, recorded for EMI with Maxim Vengerov, and toured extensively in more than forty countries.