In January 2026, Stefan Lano conducted concerts in Los Angeles commemorating the 70th birthday of American composer Richard Danielpour, after which he returned to Bogotá, Colombia for a highly lauded production of Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer. Later in 2026, he returns to Mexico City in for a new production of Puccini's Tosca at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Earlier engagements in Mexico City included a February 2025 performance of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette on short notice to critical acclaim, followed later that year
by a gala concert celebrating 70 years of the Orchestra of the Palacio de Bellas Artes and a striking new production of Richard Strauss' ELEKTRA.
November 2025 brought the world premiere of his newly-composed Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Lithuanian National Philharmonic and pianist, Muza Rubaçkyte as soloist with the composer conducting. The enthusiastic reception of the concerto obliged a repetition of the final movement of the work.
His relationship with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Semper Oper remains a cornerstone of his operatic work, with engagements there including the Nikolas Lehnhoff production of Hans Werner Henze's L'Upupa, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking and Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus.
He has appeared at Hamburg State Opera (Turandot, Tosca), Göteborg Opera (Tristan und Isolde), Lithuanian National Opera (Turandot), National Opera of Slovakia (Boris Godunov, Labohème), and the State Opera in Prague (new production of Krenek's Jonny spielt auf). Sundry other opera engagements included Porgy & Bess in Atlanta and Philadelphia, West Side Story (fifty performances in Aachen and St. Gallen), concert
performances of Turandot with the Singapore Symphony and many seasons as regular guest conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic.
Lano's symphonic experience extends across four continents, with notable concerts with the orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Montréal Symphony, Zagreb Philharmonic, National Philharmonic of Lithuania, Basel Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires, Sinfónica Nacional Argentina and the orchestras of São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Málaga, Tirana, Oulu, Athens, Skopje, Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Mendoza.
At his San Francisco Opera debut, his highly praised 1998 rendition of Berg's LULU resulted in an immediate re-engagement in 2000 for Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in 1997 and later returned to prepare Schoenberg's
Moses und Aron. This affinity for 20th-century masterworks brought him to the attention of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra, where his concert performances of Berg's Wozzeck (2002) earned an OPUS Award for Best Concert of the Season from the Conseil Québécois de la Musique. A return engagement the following 2003 season with Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane and Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle (2003) garnered a second OPUS Award.
One of the most distinctive and enduring chapters in Lano's career was his seventeen year association with the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and his thirty year association with that city. His highly acclaimed performances of the complete three-act version of Berg's LULU - marking the first performance in South
America of this final version of the work - initiated an extensive collaboration (1993–2010) with this theatre.
In 2005, at the unanimous behest of the theatre's Resident Orchestra, he was appointed Music Director of the Teatro Colón — a position previously held only by Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber, in accordance with the historic tradition that Music Directors of the Orquesta Estable del Teatro Colón be elected solely by the orchestra itself, independent of outside intervention from the government.
Lano's professional career began as Répétiteur at Graz Opera where among his duties he was solo pianist for numerous performances of Stravinsky's Petrouchka. Lorin Maazel appointed him to the Music
Staff of the Vienna State Opera in 1981 where in 1984, he was solo pianist with the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra for the world premiere performances of Luciano Berio's "Un re in ascolto" at the Vienna State Opera, Salzburg Festival, and Teatro alla Scala, all conducted by Lorin Maazel and released on the CD of Salzburger Festspiele Dokumente. Recognising Lano's exceptional musical instincts, Maazel
appointed him Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1988 which launched his international career as a conductor. His tenure in Pittsburgh was followed by positions as I. Kapellmeister in Aachen, Nürnberg and Basel. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the Music Staff of the Metropolitan Opera.
An ardent champion of contemporary music, Lano has conducted world premieres of Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner (Detroit,Cincinnati, Chicago, Charlotte, Philadelphia) and Mark Adamo's Lysistrata (Houston Grand Opera). His world-premiere recording of Joseph Summer's opera The Tempest was released by Albany
Records in 2015.
In Europe, he conducted LULU at the Deutsches Nationaltheater & Staatskapelle Weimar resulting in his immediate appointment as principle conductor of that prestigious theatre for which he would later compose and conduct incidental music for a new production of Alfred Döblin's epic novel "November 1918." It was
during the series of performances of this work that he was called to unexpectedly conduct on short notice a gala concert with the Sinfonia Varsovia celebrating the birthday of Krzysztof Penderecki in Warsaw, Poland.
Stefan Lano holds a PhD in Composition from Harvard University, where he was a Teaching Fellow on full scholarship, having earlier completed degrees in Composition and Piano at Oberlin Conservatory concurrent with an AB degree in Biology from Oberlin College. A DAAD scholarship (1977) enabled composition studies with Isang Yun at the HdK Berlin where he composed his Sinfonie Nr. 2 while concurrently studying conducting with Prof. Hans Martin Rabenstein along with further piano studies at the HdK. Italian conductor and composer Gianfranco Masini — whom he met while playing a production of Verdi's Nabucco in Graz — was a seminal influence on his future development.
His Sinfonie Nr. 1 „Aus Märchenzeit“ received a BMI Award in 1975, a Rockefeller Foundation Award from the American Music Center, and was chosen by Antal Doráti for First Prize of the National Society of Arts and Letters Firestone Award. His Sinfonie Nr. 3 "EIKASIA" was premiered in 2004 by the Lithuanian National Philharmonic with the composer conducting. In 2019, the National Symphony of Argentina presented the world premiere of his "Sieben Lieder nach Rainer Maria Rilke" for soprano and orchestra with soprano, Eiko Senda and the composer conducting.
Stefan Lano enjoyed a long-standing collaboration with the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid; his performances of Shostakovich Symphony No. 14, Stravinsky's Firebird (1919), and Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with Ellinor d'Melón at the Auditorio Nacional Madrid have been broadcast by Radio-Televisión España.
His music is published by Musikverlag Ries & Erler, Berlin.
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3.05.2026