Maestro Dante Santiago Anzolini has conducted with great success in Europe, the United States, South America, and South Africa. His extensive repertoire includes music of all styles, having conducted symphonic concerts, operas, ballets, pop, jazz, and film music, as well as modern classical works of the twenty-first century. Mo. Anzolini privileges supporting young composers and has conducted numerous world premieres of both orchestral pieces and operas.
Just last year, he returned to guest-conduct the OSESP, State Symphony Orchestra of São Pablo, Brazil, with the outstanding ballet “grupo Corpo” in three splendid concerts at the beginning of May 2024, to great success of audiences.
Mo. Anzolini’s debut in 2008 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York directing the opera “Satyagraha” by Philip Glass has been considered an extraordinary success by audiences and critics, as well as Glass’s greatest operatic triumph in New York, after the premiere of “Einstein on the Beach” in the seventies.
Mo. Anzolini’s performances in the United States include the world premiere of Philip Glass’s opera “Appomattox” at the Washington National Opera, where he made his debut in 2015, to enormous public and critical success. He has also performed in New Mexico in several concerts in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
In 2015 he made his debut in Torino and Milano conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Regio in the Italian premiere of the opera “Akhnaten” by Glass. In the same year, he was invited as a juror for the oldest international conducting competition in Besançon, France.
Mo. Anzolini debuted at the Vienna Musikverein in September 2007, with the Orfeón Donostiarra del País Basco accompanied by the Vienna Symphony. He has been awarded “Best Director of the 2006 Season” by the Association of Music Critics of Argentina.
Mo. Anzolini has collaborated with artists of the stature of Leon Fleisher, Francisco Araiza, Richard Croft, Robert Levin, Michael Kofler, Frank Morelli, Dennis Parker, David Shifrin, Miriam Makeba, Erick Friedman, and Noa Wildshut, among many others. He has worked with and conducted music by composers Philip Glass, John Harbison, Terry Riley, Osvaldo Golijov, Robert Beaser, Lisa Bielawa, Jacob Druckman, Oliver Knussen, Ezra Laderman, Tania León, Yehudy Wyner, Wim Mertens, and Nicola Scardicchio, to name a few. He has also worked with stage directors Robert Wilson, Werner Herzog, Gian-Carlo Del Monaco, Phelim McDermott, Tazewell Thompson, and several others.
Throughout his professional career, he has dedicated time and effort to music education, teaching young conductors and supporting future professional musicians: he has served as the Musical Director of the Itú Festival, Brazil, succeeding his teacher and mentor Eleazar de Carvalho (1997-1999). Anzolini was also Music Director to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Orchestra (1998-2006), where he transformed the orchestra into one of the best ensembles in Boston, performing Stravinsky’s Ballets Russes, several Mahler symphonies, and various world premieres. By unanimous vote of the faculty board, he was selected as Director of the Orchestral Program of the New England Conservatory (2002-2003), in addition to participating as Guest Director of the Youth Orchestra of the Americas (2011-2012). He has led numerous conferences and masterclasses on musical arts in several countries.
From April 2017 to March 2023, after being unanimously declared winner by vote in an international call held by the Ministry of Culture of Ecuador, he was named Artistic Director of the Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra (OSG). During his tenure, he created the international festival “Music for the Planet” in the Galapagos Islands, uniting symphonic music of all styles with awareness of environmental protection. He also created the ‘Inter-religious Music Festival’ to unite the many faiths of Guayaquil by performing their music in temples of all the creeds.
During the pandemic, Maestro Dante Santiago Anzolini led the OSG to become the first orchestra on South American soil to begin live concerts, on July 23, 2020. The orchestra performed 17 concerts in that season, offering several premieres to audiences of Guayaquil. Mo. Anzolini consolidated an agreement with SOLCA (an organization dedicated to the care of cancer patients) to offer online music classes to child and adolescent patients.
Described as a “stunning young director” (New York Times, Anthony Tommasini), he made a “splendid” (New York Post, Clive Barnes) and “memorable” (Washington Post, Anne Midgette) debut.
Mo. Anzolini has worked as the Principal Guest Conductor at the Linz Opera, in Austria, where he annually conducted opera and ballet productions from 2004 to 2015, culminating in the great success of the 2014-2015 season opening with Tosca by Puccini, widely praised by Viennese critics. He was also Musical Director of the “Teatro Argentino” Orchestra, where he led many world premieres and first performances of works by Mahler, Stravinsky, and Bartok.
During his tenure at the “Teatro Argentino,” Mo. Anzolini devised and carried out the production of La Bohème by Puccini (2018) and La Traviata by Verdi (2019). In the latter, in addition to conducting the orchestra, he also worked as the production’s stage director, choir coach, lighting designer, libretto translator, and program notes editor. As for ballet, he produced the national premiere of The Firebird, as well as the Guayaquil premiere of The Rite of Spring, both by Igor Stravinsky, plus choreographies of La Mer by Debussy and Verklaerte Nacht by Schoenberg.
Mo. Anzolini premiered the symphonies No. 1 (Andina), No. 2 (Synthetic), No. 3 (Rococó), and No. 8 (Pichincha) by the composer Luis Humberto Salgado, in addition to the Violoncello Concerto by the same composer, with Dennis Parker as a soloist. Anzolini produced, corrected, and orchestrated fragments of the manuscripts to conduct the world premiere of the cantata “Azucena de Quito” by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo. In addition, he conducted Ecuadorian premieres of pieces by Mahler, Scriabin, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Hindemith, Bartok, and Luciano Berio, among many others.
Mo. Anzolini also created a new Youth Symphony Orchestra in Guayaquil, which he directed from October 2018 to 2020, with the intention of sponsoring the musical and educational development of its young musicians by including humanities classes in their program of study. Finally, Mo. Anzolini created and directed the OSG Choir, which performed in opera productions and every national premier of symphonic-choral ensemble music he offered at the OSG. Mo. Anzolini has given a number of educational concerts, including presentations on and performances of Star Wars soundtracks, where he introduced musical orchestration to young audiences.
As a composer, he has written pieces for solo piano, large orchestra, and chamber groups, having made orchestrations and arrangements of all types of music since his adolescence. He is currently working on his second symphony, his first violin concerto, and his Paradiso Variations for Piano. Among other pieces, he has composed Quaderno per Daniel, a collection of pieces dedicated to the study of transposition. He has also authored a book of virtuoso etudes for piano. His version for piano of the Op. 31 Variations by Arnold Schoenberg – the first and only in history – has been published by Belmont and distributed worldwide by Universal Edition of Vienna, and recently premiered in Tokyo by the pianist Hiroaki Ooi, in July of 2015. His Preludium and Fugue Fantasies saw its first performance in Rio de Janeiro and was recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2015. Among his works for soloists, Anzolini has composed a sonata for solo violin, a suite for solo violoncello, and similar pieces for viola, oboe, and trombone. His Faust symphony for orchestra, adult and youth choirs, two sopranos, tenor, dancers, and percussion ensemble, based on texts by Goethe, Leopardi, G. Mistral, and the Greek “epitaph of Seikilos,” received great accolades in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in December of 2019.
Other performances include his debut at the Rhein Opera with Neither by Feldman, choreographed by Martin Schlaepfer, concerts with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas on tour in Peru and Ecuador, concerts with the Teatro Argentino orchestra, as well as performances of Il Trovatore and La Traviata, in said theater, and Otello and Rigoletto in Linz (Austria) and Mannheim (Germany), respectively. In May 2006, he conducted the Bruckner Orchester Linz on a tour of Austria and Germany (Dornbirn, Cologne, Stuttgart, and Duesseldorf). The program included Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony (first version, 1874) and the European premiere of Philip Glass’s Eighth Symphony. He has also conducted the Matav Orchestra of Budapest, Hungary, in a film music program (Bernstein, Gershwin, and Nino Rota). In September 2005, he made his South African debut conducting the MIAGI Festival Orchestra in Johannesburg and Cape Town, in a program that included a performance by the legendary singer Miriam Makeba.
In March 2005, he was one of eight young conductors chosen from more than 220 contestants for the “Conductors Preview” (the national conductor convention) organized by the American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL).
In 2002, Mo. Anzolini made his French debut at the Opera du Rhin in Strasbourg. In February 2002, he directed a successful production of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Italy, starring Ute Lemper in the central role, and choreographed by Mischa Van Hoecke. Mo. Anzolini’s debut at Carnegie Hall in New York took place in March of 2001, with the American Composers Orchestra, in a program that included two world premieres, respectively, of Tania León and Jin Hi Kim: the New York premier of the concerto for the left hand by Lukas Foss with Leon Fleisher as soloist, and Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra.
In addition to the aforementioned orchestras, he has conducted the Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn; the Bochum Symphony (Germany); the Bern Symphony (Switzerland); the orchestras of Asturias, Granada, and Valencia (Spain); the State Orchestra of San Pablo (Brazil); the National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina; the orchestra of the Argentine Theater of La Plata; “I Solisti of New York”; the Klaipeda Theater Orchestra; and the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra (Lithuania), among others.
Mo. Anzolini has collaborated frequently with composer Philip Glass, including for the world premiere of his opera The White Raven at the 1998 World Fair in Lisbon, Portugal. In 1999 he conducted the second world performance of Symphony No. 5 “Choral” in Leuven, Belgium, which also premiered in the United States and Washington DC with the Choral Arts Society of the same city at the Kennedy Center in November 2001.
His experience as an opera director includes several performances in Bonn (Germany), Bern (Switzerland), Strasbourg (France), and Klaipeda (Lithuania). In Europe, he began his career in Bonn, where he worked as a pianist and conductor at the Bonn Opera beginning in 1993. His debut at the Oper der Stadt Bonn took place in 1994 with a production of Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, with staging by Gian-Carlo Del Monaco. He also directed, among others, Cuentos de Hoffman by Offenbach, il Guarany by Carlos Gomez, and Tosca by Puccini.
In 1995, he directed a production of La Traviata in Klaipeda, Lithuania, to historic success with audiences and critics, and then debuted in Bern, Switzerland, with Il Barbiere di Siviglia. After this success, he was appointed Kapellmeister for the Bern Oper, where he later conducted The Marriage of Figaro, Madama Butterfly, and The Gypsy Baron.
From 1987 to 1992, Dante Santiago Anzolini studied orchestral conducting with Mo. Eleazar de Carvalho at Yale University, where he received two Master’s degrees (1989, 1990) with top honors, and a Doctorate in Musical Arts (1997), being named banner bearer of the “Music School” for the 1989 commencement. There, he was named Associate Conductor for the Yale Contemporary Ensemble, in addition to participating in masterclasses with Lorin Maazel, Erich Leinsdorf, Kurt Sanderling, and Dennis Russel Davies. His doctoral thesis was on the “Harmonic Organization of the Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky”.
During his studies at Yale University, he offered recitals as a pianist and harpsichordist and was a violist and percussionist in the Yale Philharmonia orchestra. He received the only award given to a young conductor at the Tanglewood summer course of 1992.
He began his studies in orchestral conducting in Argentina, under the private tutelage of Mariano Drago Sijanec, of whom he was his last disciple. After his passing, he decided to study in the United States at the Yale School of Music. Before beginning instruction in conducting, Mo. Anzolini studied violin, viola, and piano, graduating as a piano professor at the Gilardo Gilardi Conservatory in La Plata, where he also studied composition with Gerardo Gandini. He was a violist and violinist in several orchestras, studied oboe, percussion, was a harpsichordist for 10 years in the La Plata Chamber Orchestra, choir director and founder of the Youth Choir of the University of La Plata (Argentina), and Director of the Opera Choir of the Argentine Theater of the same city.
He studied mathematics at the National University of La Plata, and has also independently cultivated his passion for literature, poetry, world history, medicine, and languages throughout his life. Son of Lorenzo Dante Anzolini and Lucila Wawzyniak, Italian (Friuli-Venezia Giulia) and Chilean (Punta Arenas) immigrants, he was born in the “Roma” quarters, the Italian neighborhood of the city of Berisso, called ‘the immigrant capital,’ which welcomed thousands of immigrants from all over the world after the World War II.
His broad spectrum of interests, encompassing several languages, readings in world literature, diverse artistic endeavors, and curiosity in science and research, are a result of the multicultural facets of his birth family – just as the ethical origins of his artistic leadership can be traced to his parents’ ethical teachings and work integrity.