NOTABLE ADDITION
TSO picks fast-rising Spanish maestro Gustavo Gimeno as music director,
It has taken the Toronto Symphony Orchestra less than three months after Peter Oundjian stepped down as music director to announce a replacement.
Starting with the 2020-21 season — the orchestra’s 99th — the new music director will be Gustavo Gimeno, a 42-year-old native of Valencia, Spain, who has been serving as music director of the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra since 2015.
His TSO contract will be for five years. Sir Andrew Davis, who was music director from 1975 to 1988, is acting as interim artistic director.
Gimeno has been working professionally as a conductor for only six years, but his trajectory upward has been swift.
In a way, he began at the top after being called in at the last minute to conduct the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2014. Just a few years earlier, he had been a member of the prestigious orchestra’s percussion section.
In these few years, the Spaniard has working not just in Luxembourg but made guest appearances with great orchestras around the world. He has also been trying his hand at opera.
Toronto Symphony concertmaster Jonathan Crow says the musicians were impressed from the moment Gimeno stood up to take his first rehearsal for a program in February.
“We just played,” Crow recalls. “We played through an entire movement of a piece and he listened. He didn’t come in with a preconceived notion of what to do with the orchestra. That is unusual. Conductors don’t usually listen to what an orchestra has done.”
Gimeno vividly recalls that first rehearsal.
“I was immediately struck by two things,” he says. “There was culture in the playing, a sense of sound and style. There was also a sense of openmindedness. I was in heaven. That’s what you need as a conductor: the right material and the right attitude.”
Gimeno describes the feeling in those opening minutes as “being in a warm bath.” He admits that he sent a text to his manager during the first break saying how much he was loving the TSO.
Crow, a member of the hiring committee, says everyone in the organization was heartened by how many topquality conductors were keen on working with the orchestra. “We didn’t need to sell the job,” he adds.
Although Oundjian only left Toronto at the end of June, the TSO had known for two seasons it was going to need a replacement. Crow describes the initial list of music director candidates as “huge.” In the end, though, Gimeno had the combination of qualities everyone was looking for.
Crow sees Gimeno’s youth as an asset. “He’s not the finished product,” the violinist explains. “He is just going to get better and better.”
Gimeno’s next concert program with the TSO is late next June, when he expects to visit with his wife and 7-year-old daughter. “They’ve been hearing a lot about what a great city Toronto is and so are excited to see what their new home will be,” he says. Classical music writer John Terauds is a freelance contributor for the Star, based in Toronto. He is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Follow him on