Hans Graf

Hans Graf has combined an array of prominent music directorships with an unusually broad calendar of guest conducting invitations across continents, while maintaining an active role as a teacher. Born February 15, 1949, in Marchtrenk, Austria, near Linz, he received early instruction in violin and piano before earning diplomas in piano and conducting from the present-day University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. He attended master classes with Franco Ferrara, Sergiu Celibidache, and Arvids Jansons, then received a Soviet state scholarship that enabled study at the Leningrad Conservatory—now the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory—with Jansons, father of conductor Mariss Jansons, at a moment when Westerners seldom trained in the Soviet Union. During the 1975-1976 season Graf served as music director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. He captured first prize in the 1979 Karl-Böhm-Wettbewerb conducting competition and, two years afterward, led the Vienna State Opera orchestra in a production of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. Named music director of Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra in 1984, he recorded the complete Mozart symphonies with the ensemble and appeared at major European opera houses through the remainder of the 1980s. In 1990 he conducted the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the world-premiere recording of Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera Es war einmal. After leaving the Mozarteum Orchestra in 1994, Graf held the post of music director with the Basque National Orchestra from 1994 to 1996, the Calgary Philharmonic from 1995 to 2003, and the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine in France from 1998 to 2004. He has appeared frequently as a guest conductor with North American ensembles in Boston, Detroit, Montreal, and other cities. Serving as music director of the Houston Symphony from 2001 to 2013, he later continued there as conductor laureate, receiving an ECHO Klassik award in 2017 and a Grammy Award in 2018 for the orchestra’s recording of Berg’s Wozzeck; he also held an artist-in-residence appointment at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Graf taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum from 2014 to 2016. After several guest engagements he became chief conductor of the Singapore Symphony in 2019, retaining the position into the early 2020s. His recordings, issued on Capriccio, Chandos, Naxos, and additional labels, now number more than thirty; on the Naxos imprint in 2022 he led the Russian National Orchestra in support of trumpeter Paul Merkelo for an album of trumpet concertos by Shostakovich, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and Alexander Artunian.