PEYMAN FARZINPOUR
EXECUTIVE / ARTISTIC DIRECTOR & CONDUCTOR
Peyman Farzinpour enjoys a diverse career as a conductor, composer, music professor, and arts entrepreneur. He is currently the Executive / Artistic Director and Conductor of the new music and multimedia group, ENSEMBLE / PARALLAX and Sinfonietta Notturna in Los Angeles, as well as Director of Farzinpour Creative Music & Multimedia Ventures. He has traveled and conducted throughout major concert halls in the United States, Canada, and throughout Europe where he has conducted in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Czechia, and Bulgaria. He is equally at home with the classics, as well as adventurous, avant-garde music, much of which he has commissioned and premiered, not to mention world, pop and rock music (where he got his start as an electric guitarist!). A hallmark of many of his performances are collaborations with world-renowned multimedia and video artists, as well as choreographers and dance companies. His group, ENSEMBLE / PARALLAX, has become the first music ensemble to commission and perform each of its compositions with a new, multimedia work created exclusively for the given composition and concert.
He has previously served as Music Director and Conductor of Erato Philharmonia in Los Angeles and the the Rivers Symphony Orchestra and the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra in Massachusetts. He has also held the position of Conductor in Residence with Opera Cabal, with which he led the world staged premiere of the Georg Friedrich Haas opera ATTHIS at the Kitchen in NYC. The sold-out performances were hailed as a “mesmerizing production” by the New York Times. He has served as a guest conductor with orchestras and ensembles throughout North America and Europe including the Congress Orchestra of Saint Petersburg, the New Symphony and the Pleven Philharmonic in Bulgaria, the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic in the Czech Republic, the Banff Chamber Orchestra in Canada, the St. Matthews Chamber Orchestra in Los Angeles, at the Berklee College of Music, the Conservatoire Maurice Ravel in Paris, and with two of Italy’s foremost new music groups, the Divertimento Ensemble and the MDI Ensemble of Milan. Since 2008, he has appeared as a guest conductor at Tufts University on multiple occasions, leading concerts of contemporary music. As a professor, he has held positions at the Berklee College of Music in Boston as well as UMass Dartmouth, where he has taught everything ranging from conducting, composition, music theory and history, to the Art of Rock & Roll!
Prior to moving to the east coast, Farzinpour served as Director of New Music Programs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he was responsible for creating highly innovative concerts that were awarded first place by ASCAP/Chamber Music America for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. As Artistic Director and conductor of Erato Philharmonia, Farzinpour created programs that intertwined standard repertoire, 20th century, and contemporary music in conjunction with multimedia such as video, dance, and live painting.
Farzinpour’s compositional activity is evidenced by performances of his works throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe by groups such as the MDI, Cygnus, and Janus Ensembles, the June in Buffalo Chamber Orchestra, the St. Matthews Chamber Orchestra, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Verdi String Quartet, the Empyrean Ensemble, by pianist Leonard Stein in the Piano Spheres series, at the Conservatoire Maurice Ravel in Paris, and at the Tufts University Festival of Contemporary Music.
Farzinpour is the recipient of numerous awards such as the prestigious Berklee Faculty Fellowship in 2018, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) Artists Grant for the past three years, the Fellowship Merit Award in Music Composition from RISCA in 2017, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Subito Grant from the American Composers Forum, and Faculty Development and Recording Grants from the Berklee College of Music over the past two years. He has also been a composer in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. Farzinpour’s upcoming performances include new pieces for ENSEMBLE / PARALLAX and concerts at the Berklee College of Music.
Farzinpour has also served as a lecturer and pre-concert speaker for the Pasadena Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was the Manager of the Education and Community Programs. He holds a B.M. in classical guitar performance from the Peabody Conservatory, a B.A. in English Literature from the Johns Hopkins University, and an M.A. in composition from U.C. Davis. He did post-graduate studies in Italy, where he studied conducting with Emilio Pomarico and Sandro Gorli, and composition with Giacomo Manzoni. He has also studied conducting with Gustav Meier at the International Conductors Workshop.
For more info regarding Sinfonietta Notturna, please visit the Sinfonietta Notturna website or contact: sinfoniettanotturnala@gmail.com
You may also read about it at on Blogger at Concerts & Cocktails With Sinfonietta Notturna Los Angeles.