Hans Graf

Conductor Hans Graf, in addition to holding several major positions as music director, has made an exceptionally wide range of appearances as a guest conductor. He is also active as an educator. Graf was born on February 15, 1949, in Marchtrenk, Austria, near Linz. He studied violin and piano as a child, and he graduated with diplomas in piano and conducting from what is now the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. Graf took conducting master classes with Franco Ferrara, Sergiu Celibidache, and Arvids Jansons, and he was admitted under a Soviet state scholarship to the Leningrad Conservatory (now the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory) for further study with Jansons, the father of prominent conductor Mariss Jansons, at a time when few Westerners studied in the Soviet Union. During the 1975-1976 season, Graf served as music director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. He took the first prize at the Karl-Böhm-Wettbewerb conducting competition in 1979, and two years later, he conducted the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera in a production of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. In 1984, Graf was appointed music director of the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg, recording the complete symphonies of Mozart with that group, and he also made appearances at various major European opera houses in the 1980s. In 1990, he conducted the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the world premiere recording of Alexander Zemlinsky's opera Es war einmal. Leaving the Mozarteum Orchestra in 1994, Graf joined the Basque National Orchestra from 1994 to 1996, the Calgary Philharmonic from 1995 to 2003, and the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine in France from 1998 to 2004, holding the position of music director with all these. Graf has frequently been active in North America, appearing as guest conductor with orchestras in Boston, Detroit, and Montreal, among other cities. He was music director of the Houston Symphony from 2001 to 2013 and has continued to appear there as conductor laureate, earning an ECHO Klassik award in 2017 and a Grammy Award in 2018 for the orchestra’s recording of Berg's opera Wozzeck. He also served as artist-in-residence at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Graf taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum from 2014 to 2016. After several guest appearances with the group, Graf became chief conductor of the Singapore Symphony in 2019; he continued to hold that position as of the early 2020s. Graf has recorded for Capriccio, Chandos, Naxos, and other labels; on the latter imprint, he led the Russian National Orchestra, backing trumpeter Paul Merkelo on an album of trumpet concertos by Shostakovich, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and Alexander Artunian, in 2022. By that time, his recording catalog comprised more than 30 items. ~ James Manheim