Tito Muñoz

Born in New York in 1983, the conductor Tito Muñoz began his musical training as a violinist before studying with David Zinman and Murry Sidlin at the American Academy of Conducting in Aspen. Awarded the Robert J. Harth Conductor Prize (2005) and the Aspen Conducting Prize (2006), he later returned to the Aspen Music Festival as an assistant and guest conductor. He also gained important experience at the National Conducting Institute under Leonard Slatkin and as an assistant to Paavo Järvi with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and to Franz Welser-Möst with the Cleveland Orchestra, where he had already made his debut in 2006 and also conducted productions with the Joffrey Ballet. In 2009 he received a scholarship from the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Foundation, and the following year he was a prizewinner in the Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt. From 2011 to 2013, Tito Muñoz served as music director at the Opéra national de Lorraine and the Orchestre symphonique et lyrique de Nancy. Since the 2014-15 season, he has led the Phoenix Symphony as principal conductor. Muñoz has performed with many of the major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and National Symphony Orchestra, as well as orchestras in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. He has made guest appearances with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the hr Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo and at the opera houses of Rennes and Montpellier. Through commissions and premieres (including compositions by Christopher Cerrone, Kenneth Fuchs, Dai Fujikura, Adam Schoenberg, and Mauricio Sotelo), he has championed contemporary music, particularly the work of Michael Hersch, whose violin concerto he premiered with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and also recorded.

November 2022