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James Gaffigan joined the San Francisco Symphony as Associate Conductor in fall 2006. In that role, he leads the Orchestra in concerts throughout the season, including subscription weeks and all classical Summer in the City concerts. He also assists Michael Tilson Thomas during his Davies Symphony Hall conducting weeks, on tour, and with recording and multimedia projects. He made his subscription concert debut last March, in a program that included the Brahms Symphony No. 3 and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2. From 2003 to 2006, Mr. Gaffigan was assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. He is also Music Director of CityMusic, a chamber orchestra in Cleveland that presents free concerts throughout the city.
Born in 1979 in New York City, James Gaffigan studied at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Juilliard School Preparatory Division. He received his undergraduate degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, where he majored in bassoon performance and began his conducting studies with Frank Battisti. In 2003 he earned his master's degree in conducting at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, where he worked with Lawrence Rachleff. In the summer of 2000, Mr. Gaffigan was one of eight conductors chosen by David Zinman to participate as an Academy Conductor in the inaugural year of the American Academy of Conducting in Aspen. Two years later he received the Academy's first Robert Harth Conducting Award, and he made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival as part of a collaboration between the Cleveland Orchestra and the Aspen Music Festival and School. The following summer, he was selected as a conducting fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center.
In September 2004, James Gaffigan was a first-prize winner at the Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt, Germany, and during the 2005-06 season he made his debut with the Frankfurt Gesellschaft Museum Orchestra as a part of this award. Highlights of James Gaffigan's 2007-2008 season in North America include debuts with the Toronto, Houston, Utah, Charlotte and San Antonio symphony orchestras; in Europe, he makes first appearances with the Rotterdam and Royal Liverpool philharmonic orchestras, the Bournemouth Symphony, National Orchestra of Belgium, Guiseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan, and the Orchestra of Italian Switzerland in Lugano. In the US, he has conducted the New World, Indianapolis, and Fort Worth symphony orchestras and the Rochester Philharmonic, and he has led concerts with the orchestras of the Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin School of Music, Carnegie-Mellon University, Kent/Blossom Festival, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. Increasingly active as an opera conductor, James Gaffigan led his first opera production in 2003, conducting Così fan tutte at the Shepherd School of Music. He made his professional opera debut at the Zurich Opera in June 2005 conducting La Bohème, and he returned to Zurich for performances of the same production in May 2006.
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