Julian Wachner

Julian Wachner works as a conductor, composer, and keyboardist with equal fluency and drive. He has held the post of music director at New York’s Trinity Wall Street Church since 2011.

Born in Los Angeles in 1969, Wachner spent his childhood in the Hollywood district amid a household steeped in music. At age four he began piano and cello instruction through the University of Southern California; at nine he relocated to New York to pursue composition studies at the Saint Thomas Choir School. He later enrolled at the Boston University College of Fine Arts, where Lukas Foss numbered among his composition teachers, and he added organ lessons at Marsh Chapel to prepare for choral direction. During his student years he helped establish the Boston Bach Ensemble and led both the Back Bay Chorale and the Providence Singers in Rhode Island. After receiving his D.M.A. from Boston University in 1996, he joined the faculty of the university’s School of Theology as assistant professor of sacred music in 1999. Two years later he moved to Montreal and joined McGill University, where he created the Schulich Singers and the Bach-Academie de Montréal while directing university and civic choirs and ensembles. He also wrote and introduced the opera Evangeline Revisited to mark the 250th anniversary of the Acadians’ expulsion from the Maritime provinces.

In 2008 Wachner was appointed director of the Washington Chorus; three years afterward he departed McGill to assume leadership at Trinity Wall Street, thereby taking charge of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and the contemporary-music group NOVUS NY. The New York setting enabled performances of both his sacred and secular works; he has characterized his idiom as lying “between the Apollonian world of church music and the academy and the Dionysian world of opera and the stage.” In 2013 he joined the Trinity College Choir for appearances on the Rolling Stones’ “50 and Counting” tour. He has also served as guest conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Opera and has participated in numerous summer festivals. Naxos issued two volumes of his music in 2010 and 2014, and he maintains an extensive discography as a conductor, much of it devoted to contemporary repertoire. In 2020 he participated in the world-premiere recording of Ellen Reid’s opera p r i s m with NOVUS NY and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. Since 2018 he has served as artistic director of Michigan’s Grand Rapids Bach Festival.