Edo de Waart

Conductor Edo de Waart launched his professional path in his native Netherlands before taking the helm of orchestras and opera stagings across multiple continents. Several prominent American posts marked his trajectory after an initial breakthrough there.

Born in Amsterdam on June 1, 1941, de Waart grew up surrounded by music and began studying oboe as a teenager at the Sweelinck Conservatory, where he also enrolled in conducting and piano classes yet concentrated initially on his instrument. He secured associate principal posts with both the Amsterdam Philharmonic, now known as the Netherlands Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. While pursuing private conducting instruction with Franco Ferrara in Hilversum, he made his podium debut in 1964 leading the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. That same year he claimed first prize in New York’s Dimitri Mitropoulos Conducting Competition, which brought a twelve-month appointment as assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic.

In 1967 he established the Netherlands Wind Ensemble and simultaneously assumed the role of co-music director, later music director, of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, a position he held until 1979. Two years earlier he had been named music director of the San Francisco Symphony, an ensemble with which he made one of his earliest digital recordings—an ECM account of John Adams’ Harmonium issued in 1984. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he continued to advocate for Adams’ compositions, and in San Francisco he also presented a complete staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Between 1986 and 1995 he served as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Returning to the Netherlands, de Waart directed the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic from 1989 until 2004. He then led the Sydney Symphony in Australia from 2004 to 2014, ultimately stepping down in part because he found the acoustics of the Sydney Opera House unsatisfactory. Concurrently he held the posts of chief conductor and artistic director of the Hong Kong Symphony Orchestra from 2004 to 2012. In 2009 he relocated to the Milwaukee area with his wife, Rebecca Dopp, and became chief conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; that tenure ended in 2017, after which he was named conductor laureate.

He likewise served as chief conductor of deFilharmonie, now the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, from 2011 to 2016. Following several guest engagements, he was appointed the first principal guest conductor of the San Diego Symphony in 2019 and continued in that capacity into the mid-2020s, when he had reached his early eighties. Across the many ensembles he has directed, de Waart has built an extensive and wide-ranging discography encompassing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orchestral literature, opera, contemporary scores, and repertory from diverse national traditions, including several recordings of works by composer Carl Vine made with the Sydney Symphony. He has also documented Dutch music, among them pieces by Reinbert de Leeuw that he recorded with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic for a 2023 Challenge Classics release. By then his catalog exceeded eighty recordings.