Bruno Ferrandis began his tenure as music director and conductor of the Santa Rosa Symphony in Fall 2006. Born in Algiers in 1960 and raised in Nice, France, Ferrandis has recently taken up residence in San Francisco. He has conducted all over the world, and his breadth of musical experience includes not only symphony and opera, but also ballet, musical theater and cinema-accompanying music.
A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he received a master’s degree in conducting from The Juilliard School. He was conductor of Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra and Juilliard Opera Center. He also co-founded the New Music ensemble “Music Mobile” in New York City, and has recorded three compact discs with the Radio France Orchestra.
Conducting credits include modern and classical ballet companies in New York City, France and Italy.
In Asia, he conducted the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, The Seoul Philharmonic, and worked with the Tokyo New National Theater. In Israel, he conducted the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra; in Eastern Europe, the Polish Radio Orchestra, the Prague State Theater Orchestra, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra; in Great Britain, the BBC Northern Orchestra; in Germany and Austria, the Lübeck Hanseatic Orchestra, the Mainz Bach Chor, the Klangforum Wien; in Italy, the Orchestra Regio di Torino, the Opera of Genoa Orchestra, the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia Orchestra; in Spain, the Pamplona Sarasate Orchestra, the Madrid Radio-Television Orchestra, the Seville Symphony Orchestra and the Valencia Orchestra. In France, he has conducted in all the major cities including Bordeaux and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1997 he received a “Critic’s Grand Prize” for his conducting of Wozzeck by Manfred Gurlitt.
In North America, Ferrandis conducted major opera works at the Canadian Opera Company (Toronto) and served as Music Director of the Banff Art Center (Alberta) from 1991 to 2000. And he conducted numerous concerts with the Aspen Festival Orchestras until 1994.
Ferrandis has collaborated with a wide variety of entertainment artists such as the actors and movie directors John Neville, Atom Egoyan, Colm Feore, Robert Lepage, François Girard, Stephen Wadsworth
and choreographer Martha Clarke. In December of 2008, Ferrandis will conduct the Santa Rosa Symphony in the West Coast premiere of Martin Matalon’s score to accompany Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis at Stanford University.
He has worked closely with the following living composers: in America with Jacob Druckman (created a workshop of his opera Medea), William Schuman, David Diamond, George Tsontakis and Edward Campion; in Canada with Randolph Peters and Harry Sommers (their operas); in France and Europe with Martin Matalon (the music for Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis), Mauricio Kagel and his lively music theater (Warsaw Autumn Festival), Ahmed Essyad (Oratorio for the Theater Festival in Avignon, France), Claude Ballif, Yves Prin, Pascal Dusapin, and celebrated composers Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio.
Bruno Ferrandis speaks his native French, as well as English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian. He also studies ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek to allow reading of the great texts of biblical and mythological times.
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