Michael Lewanski
Conductor, curator, educator, and writer Michael Lewanski is a champion of new and old musics. He seeks to facilitate engaged connections between audiences, musicians, composers, and the music that is part of their culture, society, and history. His work fosters a critical perspective towards the classical music industry’s historical injustices with the goal of collective, systemic change. He is conductor of Ensemble Dal Niente and Associate Professor of instrumental ensembles at the DePaul University School of Music, where his work focuses on training the next generation of musicians to be maximally responsible and thoughtful artistic citizens.
Michael was Curatorial Director of Ear Taxi Festival 2021. He was resident conductor of the 2017 and 2019 SoundSCAPE Festivals in Italy. His guest conducting engagements have been wide-ranging and stylistically diverse, working with organizations such as the the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW Series, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan, Ensamble CEPROMUSIC (Centro de Experimentación y Producción de Música Contemporánea, Mexico City), Composers Conference (Brandeis Univeristy), Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition’s Grossman Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Chicago Chamber Musicians, Mocrep, and others. He has led hundreds of world premieres. He was the Conducting Assistant for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago from 2010 to 2014. At the 2012 Darmstadt Summer Courses, Ensemble Dal Niente won the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize under his direction.
Michael has an extensive discography as both conductor and producer. His recordings appear on Carrier Records, New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recordings, New World Records, Parlour Tapes+, and PARMA Recordings. His discography includes works by George Lewis, Franco Donatoni, Dai Fujikura, Marcos Balter, Anthony Cheung, Erin Gee, Eliza Brown, Aaron Einbond, Kyong-Mee Choi, Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Katherine Young, and Kurt Westerberg. He has acted as producer for recordings by Ensemble Dal Niente, Spektral Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, and violinist J. Austin Wulliman.
A native of Savannah, Georgia, he made his conducting debut at age 13 with the Savannah Symphony Orchestra. At 16, he was the youngest student ever accepted into the conducting class of the legendary Ilya Musin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. Michael attended Yale University, where his studies included conducting with Lawrence Leighton Smith and piano with Sara Laimon. He was music director of the Yale Bach Society Orchestra and conductor of the Yale College Opera Company. His post-Yale education featured conducting study with Cliff Colnot and Dutch new music expert Lucas Vis.
Michael assisted in the organization of There is No Repetition: Mathias Spahlinger at 70 in March 2015. Other recent festival appearances include soundSCAPE (2017, 2019), June in Buffalo (2016-2017, 2019), the Ear Taxi Festival (2016), New Music Gathering (Baltimore, 2016), Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico City (2015, 2018), the 2013 Ecstatic Music Festival (in which Dal Niente collaborated with the rockband Deerhoof), the 2013 Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Northwestern New Music Conference (2014, 2015), Omaha Under the Radar (2015, 2018), and MusicArte festival in Panama (2013, 2015).
Michael is frequent writer on music and other artforms; his pieces have shown up in diverse and sometime unobvious locations, including New Music Box, Cacophony Magazine, WQXR.org, Ensemble Dal Niente's blog, and various program books.