about stefano
Stefano Flavoni is a young conductor hailing from New York, currently serving as an Assistant Conductor of the Staatsoper Hamburg and Lakes Area Music Festival, and cover conductor of the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony. Flavoni was recently selected by the Solti Foundation U.S. as a 2023 recipient of the prestigious Career Assistance Award for young conductors.
Maestro Flavoni has been described by harpsichordist Davitt Moroney as someone who “digests all new sounds he has heard and turns them into something different, something that is uniquely Stefano Flavoni and is stamped by a kind of hallmark of musical intensity.”
Stefano has also served as cover conductor for such notable institutions as the Baltimore Symphony and Berkeley Symphony. He has been mentored by several luminaries of classical music, including Manfred Honeck, James Levine, Michael Morgan, Christian Reif, and Kent Nagano, and has assisted such notable conductors as Gustavo Dudamel, Herbert Blomstedt, and Michael Tilson Thomas. He has also had the pleasure of participating in masterclasses with some of the world's top artists and pedagogues, including Sir Simon Rattle, Pierre-Andre Valade, and Larry Rachleff.
In the field of opera, he has worked as assistant conductor on numerous works, including Ariadne auf Naxos, Don Pasquale, and The Rake’s Progress with the Lakes Area Music Festival, Die Walküre with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Simone Young, and Barber’s Vanessa with West Edge Opera. A sought-out vocal coach, the vast number of singers he has coached includes Davóne Tines, Julia Bullock, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Felicia Moore, Brandie Sutton, Errin Duane Brooks, and many more. An accomplished pianist, Stefano Flavoni has performed in recital with notable soloists as Grammy-winner Dashon Burton, Metropolitan Opera tenor David Portillo, and jazz vocalist Paula West.
He has made strides in the field of contemporary music, including having served as Music Director of the critically-acclaimed “Abraham in Flames”, a 2019 opera by Niloufar Talebi and Aleksandra Vrebalov featuring the Young Women’s Choral Project of San Francisco and alumni of the San Francisco Opera Merola Program. He also recently served as assistant conductor on a new production of John Adams’ El Niño with the American Modern Opera Company, featuring Julia Bullock, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Davóne Tines, Rachael Wilson, and musicians of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra.
An ardent advocate for inspiring music performance in the younger generations, Maestro Flavoni is currently the Music Director of the San Francisco Arts Education Project, for which he has introduced high-level music training to hundreds of students of the San Francisco Bay Area. He has served on the faculty of San Francisco Conservatory of Music as Music Director of Pre-College Opera and Musical Theatre. Flavoni also formerly served as a research fellow in music and philosophy at the Zephyr Institute at Stanford University. He has also spoken on the topics of music, politics, and social justice in the 4D Mentor Talk Series with the Khadem Foundation. His conversations with several notable musicians can be heard on Spotify and Apple Music in the podcast What’s Not There.
He attended the University of California, Berkeley as a Regents and Chancellor's Scholar on full academic scholarship, studying conducting under David Milnes and Marika Kuzma, composition under Franck Bedrossian, and musicology under Richard Taruskin. While at Berkeley, he served as music director of the UC Berkeley Opera Ensemble, performing numerous scenes concerts, as well as a production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which won the 2015 Eisner Prize in the Arts.
Stefano is a diehard fan of the New York Yankees, New York Knicks, and AS Roma. In his free time, he cooks traditional Roman cuisine, writes poetry that is occasionally not terrible, and records jazz covers of 90s/early 2000s hip hop classics. He also has an embarrassing amount of esoteric Star Wars lore committed to memory.