JoAnn Falletta

JoAnn Falletta has earned recognition as a conductor whose incisive readings have centered on American repertoire, spanning contemporary scores and earlier pieces that encompass numerous works by female composers. Over time she assembled an expansive catalog that encompasses core pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, and Debussy alongside less frequently programmed scores by Reger, Schreker, Bax, and Ibert. She has directed ensembles throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia and has produced more than one hundred recordings for multiple labels, collecting several major awards in the process.

Born in Queens, New York, on February 27, 1954, Falletta grew up with parents who were not musicians yet supported her early fascination with classical guitar. She completed undergraduate studies at the Mannes School of Music in New York before pursuing postgraduate training at Juilliard, where she earned a doctorate in conducting in 1989.

Her first leadership post came in 1977 as music director of the Queens Philharmonic Orchestra; she remained for a decade while also assuming the helm of the Denver Chamber Orchestra in 1983 (a position she held until 1992) and the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic from 1986 to 1996. In 1989 she was named music director of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, guiding the ensemble through three consecutive sell-out seasons that strengthened its finances, and she stayed until 2001. That same year her debut recording, Baroquen Treasures with the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic, was released. A longer commitment began in 1991 when she became music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, a role she maintained until 2020, at which point she was named the orchestra’s music director laureate. Her 1999 appointment as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra marked her as the first woman to lead a major American orchestra and placed her among roughly a dozen of the country’s most prominent conductors. Between 2008 and 2012 she served on the National Council on the Arts, and in 2019 the Buffalo Philharmonic extended her contract through the 2025–2026 season.

Falletta’s discography exceeds one hundred releases, issued primarily on Naxos. She has received four Grammy Awards, two of them for the 2008 Naxos recording with the Buffalo Philharmonic of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan. Her first individual Grammy, awarded in the Best Classical Compendium category, recognized the 2018 release Kenneth Fuchs: Piano Concerto “Spiritualist”; Poems of Life; Glacier; Rush, performed with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2019 Performance Today named her its first Classical Woman of the Year. The following year she led a recording of Richard Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua that received a Grammy for Best Choral Performance. Marking her twenty-fifth anniversary with the Buffalo Philharmonic, Naxos reissued twenty albums that had originally appeared on the Beau Fleuve label.