Sarah Ioannides

www.sarahioannidesmusic.com

 

Biografie

As a music director and guest conductor who is committed to collaboration, innovation and education, Sarah Ioannides invigorates programming and inspires audiences.  Praised by the New York Times for her “unquestionable strength and authority”, she is Music Director of Washington State’s Symphony Tacoma and Resident Conductor of NYO-USA, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America. While centred on the USA, her conducting career has taken her to six continents.
 
Born in Australia of Cypriot and Scottish descent, Sarah Ioannides trained in the UK (Oxford University, Guildhall School) and USA (Juilliard School and Curtis Institute). Before assuming her role at Symphony Tacoma in 2014, she established a reputation as the dynamic music director of both the El Paso Symphony Orchestra in Texas and the Spartanburg Philharmonic in South Carolina.
 
Her extensive repertoire, which spans four centuries, has been enriched through her work with living composers, not least as the conductor of over 60 world, North American and European premieres.   She has collaborated with such figures as Steve Reich, Aaron J Kernis, Zosha Di Castri, Patrice Rushen and in the earlier years of her career was mentored by Tan Dun, notably taking charge of the Australian and Greek premieres of his Water Passion after St. Matthew and acting as his assistant conductor with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra.  One of her earliest operatic projects was the European premiere of Stephen Paulus’s The Woodlanders.
 
Since becoming the first woman to hold a full-time conducting position with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, she has appeared as a guest conductor with orchestras across North America, among them the Buffalo Philharmonic, Charleston Symphony, Hamilton Philharmonic, Hawai’i Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, Roanoke Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic Sarasota Orchestra, Toledo Symphony, and Tulsa Symphony.
 
In addition to her Symphony Tacoma seasons, her North American schedule for 2023-24 features concerts with the Florida Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica and San Antonio Symphony. The programming ranges wide – from Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Brahms, Dvořák, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Bartók and Korngold to re-emerging composers like Louise Farrenc, Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Joseph Boulogne, and contemporary works by Aaron J Kernis, Valerie Coleman, Bernard Roumain, Nick DiBerardino and Jesse Montgomery.
 
Beyond North America, Sarah Ioannides’ past and current engagements  include the Bilbao Symphony,  Brussels Philharmonic, Daejeon Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Malmö Symphony, Nordic Chamber Orchestra, Tonkünstler-Orchester (Vienna), Orchestre National de Lyon, Royal Philharmonic (London) and Simón Bolívar Symphony.     
 
Making creative use of technology to expand musical horizons, she has led numerous multimedia projects in both the concert hall and the digital environment. These include videos to illustrate Holst’s Planets, Steve Reich’s Desert Music and Milhaud’s Création du Monde and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Symphony Tacoma’s Encore Series and the ‘digital collage’ Eternal Light:  inspired by Mozart’s Requiem, it comprises clips of music, dance, poetry and visual art created by students in the Pacific Northwest.
 
One of Sarah Ioannides’ significant achievements in the field of education is Cascade Conducting & Composing; she is Founding Artistic Director of this annual Tacoma-based programme, established in 2017, which offers scholarships to diverse musicians from the US and the rest of the world. Among the conservatory orchestras she conducts are those of Yale University, Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and Bloomington’s Jacobs School of Music. A sought-after guest speaker, Sarah Ioannides sits on numerous advisory boards and has served on the panel of the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) for the US Government. In 2022 she spoke at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Women in Classical Music Symposium and conference, and was invited as speaker to the Dallas Symposium; Women in Classical Music 2022. In June 2023 was panellist at ‘Bridges to the Future’, and at the conference of the League of American Orchestras.