Edo de Waart (Chief Conductor)

Edo de Waart is Chief Conductor of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic (deFilharmonie), Music Director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Laureate of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. He is also an Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Edo de Waart studied oboe, piano and conducting in Amsterdam. After his graduation he took the position of Associate Principal Oboe of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Two years later, at the age of 23, he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Conducting Competition in New York, which resulted in his appointment as Assistant Conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic. Upon his return to the Netherlands he joined the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as Assistant Conductor to Bernard Haitink. In 1967 he was appointed Guest Conductor by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Six years later he was promoted to the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director. He subsequently was appointed Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra, Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor of De Nederlandse Opera. He also served as Chief Conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

Other conducting highlights include performances with the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the NHK Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, Edo de Waart has worked in the world’s greatest opera houses: the Metropolitan Opera, the Opéra de Bastille, Covent Garden, the Dutch Opera, Nikikai Opera, the Geneva Opera and the Santa Fe Opera.

Edo de Waart’s extensive CD catalog includes releases for Philips, Virgin, EMI, Telarc and RCA. With the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra he recorded the complete orchestral works of Rachmaninov and Wagner’s orchestral work for the label Octavia/Exton. He intends to record the large orchestra repertoire with deFilharmonie in the future.