“Starting with the 2020-21 season—the orchestra’s 99th—the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s new music director will be Gustavo Gimeno, a 42-year-old native of Valencia, Spain, who has been serving as music director of the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra since 2015,” writes John Terauds in Monday’s (9/17) Toronto Star (Canada). He replaces Peter Oundjian, who stepped down in June 2018. “His TSO contract will be for five years. Sir Andrew Davis, who was music director from 1975 to 1988, is acting as interim artistic director. Gimeno has been working professionally as a conductor for only six years, but his trajectory upward has been swift. [He was] called in at the last minute to conduct the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2014. Just a few years earlier, he had been a member of the prestigious orchestra’s percussion section. In these few years, the Spaniard has working not just in Luxembourg but made guest appearances with great orchestras around the world. He has also been trying his hand at opera…. Toronto Symphony Concertmaster Jonathan Crow says the musicians were impressed from the moment Gimeno stood up to take his first rehearsal for a program in February.”
Posted September 18, 2018
Gustavo Gimeno photo by Marco Borggreve
