Women and Conducting

Plácido Domingo

Is a globally renowned tenor, conductor, and arts administrator.

Born in Spain, Plácido Domingo has recorded over 100 complete operas and is well known for his versatility, regularly performing in Italian, French, German, Spanish, English, and Russian in the most prestigious opera houses in the world. Although primarily a lirico-spinto tenor for most of his career, especially popular for his Cavaradossi, Hoffmann, Don José, and Canio, he quickly moved into more dramatic roles, becoming the most acclaimed Othello of his generation. In the early 2010s, he transitioned from the tenor repertoire into almost exclusively baritone parts, most notably Simon Boccanegra. He has performed 147 different roles.

Domingo has also achieved significant success as a crossover artist, especially in the genres of Latin and popular music. In addition to winning 14 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, several of his records have gone silver, gold, platinum, and multiplatinum. His first pop album, Perhaps Love (1981), spread his fame beyond the opera world with the title song, selling almost four million copies and leading to numerous television appearances for the tenor. In 1990, he began singing with fellow tenors Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras as part of the Three Tenors. The first Three Tenors recording became the best selling classical album of all time.

Domingo also conducts operas and concerts, is currently the general director of the Los Angeles Opera in California, and leads the Centro de Perfeccionamiento Plácido Domingo at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain. He was initially the artistic director and later general director of the Washington National Opera from 1996 to 2011. He has been involved in numerous humanitarian works and efforts to help young opera singers, including starting and running the international singing competition Operalia.

For further information, visit Plácido Domingo’s website.

Alice Farnham

Is co-founder and artistic director of ‘Women Conductors @ Royal Philharmonic Society’.

Alice Farnham was music director of the Welsh National Youth Opera in 2013 and 2016. Her roles as guest conductor include those at Mariinsky Theatre, Royal Opera House, Stockholm Folkoperan, Teatru Manoel Valletta, Grange Park Opera, and Singapore Lyric Opera. She has been a guest conductor with many major ballet companies as well, including royal ballets at Covent Garden and Birmingham, England, and in Denmark. Other engagements include Nordiska Kammerorkester, Gävle Symfoniorkester, DalaSinfoniettan, Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, and Women of the World Orchestra.

Farnham was guest music staff at the Covent Garden Royal Opera from 2005 to 2016. A student of the legendary Ilya Musin, she studied conducting at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory from 1997 to 2000. She was an organ scholar at Oxford University and at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, in New York City.

She is cofounder and artistic director of Women Conductors at the Royal Philharmonic Society, a program created to encourage women to go into conducting. Farnham is guest lecturer for other female conducting programs including the Dallas Opera’s Linda and Mitch Hart Institute for Women Conductors.

For further information, visit Alice Farnham’s website.

Bio provided by the artist.

Vanessa Garde

Film and television composer, arranger, orchestrator, music producer and technologist.

A faculty member at Berklee College of Music’s campus in Valencia, Vanessa Garde teaches courses for the Master of Music in scoring for film, television, and video games.

After graduating from Berklee with a Bachelor of Music, her work has included films such as Exodus (Ridley Scott), Tarde para la Ira (Raúl Arévalo), Misconduct (starring Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, and Al Pacino), Everyone Has a Plan (starring Viggo Mortensen), and The Cold Light of Day (Bruce Willis, Sigourney Weaver), among others.

Throughout her career, Garde has collaborated with 12-time Grammy-winning music producer/engineer Rafa Sardina, Alberto Iglesias, David Newman, Joey Newman, Federico Jusid, K.C. Porter, and Jeff Russo, among others. She has also worked as a freelance orchestrator, arranger, and composer for film, commercials, and television, including on the national Spanish television Antena 3 series Galerías Velvet, Grand Hotel, and My Little Pony, among others.

Garde has received the Quincy Jones Award and Doug Timm Award at Berklee and was a finalist in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival Composer’s Lab Workshop.

For further information visit Vanessa Garde’s profile.

Yi-Chen Lin

Conductor, violinist, and pianist.

Born on December 10, 1985, into a musician family in Taipei, Taiwan, Yi-Chen Lin moved to Austria at the age of 8. She started her career first as a violinist and a pianist, and won several national and international competitions. At the same time, she cultivated her passion for conducting, combined with instrumental studies at the University of Music and Performing Art in Vienna.

In June 2009, Lin made her conducting debut in the Golden Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein with the Radio Symphonic Orchestra Vienna, conducting Bela Bartók’s Deux Portraits, and in August 2011, she gave her debut as an opera conductor with Il viaggio a Reims by Gioachino Rossini at the Rossini Festival Pesaro, to which she was reinvited in August 2013 to conduct L'occasione fa il ladro. That year she also made her debut in the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos as well with the HR-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt and the RTV Slovenian Symphony Orchestra in Vienna. In October 2014, she made her Spanish debut in the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid with Carmen by Georges Bizet. In October 2015, she gave her house debut in the Auditorio de Tenerife with Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.

Lin has obtained important musical impulses through great maestros such as Zubin Mehta, Alberto Zedda, Bernard Haitink, and David Zinman, and her activities as a conductor have been broadcast in a documentary about female conductors on ORF, an Austrian national television station.

Bio provided by the artist.

Nan Schwartz

Is a Grammy winner, five-time Grammy nominee, and seven-time Emmy nominee.

Nan Schwartz is considered a pioneer among women composers. Her family legacy includes a father who played with the Glenn Miller Band and performed on nearly every Frank Sinatra recording, and a mother who performed such chart-topping hits as “Chicago” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” for musical legend Tommy Dorsey before working as a studio singer for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Henry Mancini, and Sonny and Cher, among others.

But Schwartz didn’t immediately set out to follow in her parents’ footsteps, instead opting for a career in television production. A skiing accident was the catalyst that brought her back to the world of music. While on the mend, she began private studies to pursue her secret ambition: film scoring, a profession previously inaccessible to women. Utilizing her lifelong devotion to music and her experience studying piano and singing professionally from an early age, Schwartz was able to forge a successful career that saw her compose, arrange, and orchestrate music for countless memorable films and television series including In the Heat of the Night and Argo. Award recognition quickly followed Schwartz’s pioneering efforts in the industry and eventually led to a Grammy win for arrangements for Natalie Cole’s 2009 song “Here’s That Rainy Day”.

A proponent of melodic, harmonically rich music, Schwartz’s unique style has made its mark in film, television, the recording industry, and symphonic performance. Her diversity and depth of experience in all musical compositions—themes, songs, episodic television, and film—from synthesizer projects to hundred-piece orchestral settings, have helped create her sterling reputation as one of the world’s most talented composers.

For further information, visit Nan Schwartz’s website.

Bio provided by the artist.

Miriam González

Lawyer, and Founder and chair of Inspiring Girls International

Miriam González is a partner at the international law firm Dechert LLP, where she is cochair of the firm’s international trade and government regulation practice, focusing on international and European Union (EU) trade law and policy.

Prior to joining Dechert, González led the trade practice of another major international law firm. She previously served seven years as a senior member of the cabinet for EU external relations commissioners Chris Patten and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, where she had responsibility for EU relations and trade with the Middle East, the U.S., and Latin America. She has also served as a Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) adviser during the United Kingdom’s EU presidency.

After studying law at the University of Valladolid in Spain, González was awarded a postgraduate scholarship, which allowed her to carry on her studies at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. She was also a senior associate member of Saint Antony’s College in Oxford, England.

González is a non-executive member of the board and chair of the audit committee of UBS Limited. She is also the honorary president of Canning House, a member of the international advisory board of the Instituto de Empresa in Spain, and the founder and chair of Inspiring Girls International, a charity dedicated to raising the aspirations of young girls around the world by connecting them with female role models.

Bio provided by the guest speaker.

Luana Chailly

Production Director of Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain

Born into a family of musicians in Milan, Italy, Luana Chailly started to study piano when she was 8. Although the focus of her bachelor’s degree was communications and marketing, while she was studying she cultivated a passion for production, which led her to get several opportunities to work with artists, accompanying them to festivals like the Montreux Jazz Festival and Festival di Sanremo.

After she graduated in 2012, Chailly started her career in the Accademia Teatro alla Scala coordinating the activity of the orchestra department, and in 2016, she became responsible for one of the offices of Ricordi Music School in Milan, organizing all the annual activities for more than 200 students.

In June 2009, she moved to Valencia to manage the Centre de Perfeccionament Plácido Domingo, a young artist’s program for opera singers strongly supported by Helga Schmidt, former intendant and artistic director at Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, and Plácido Domingo. During her six years there, Chailly had the opportunity to work with a vast array of great artists including Alberto Zedda, Roger Vignoles, Emilio Sagi, and Damiano Michieletto, organizing courses, concerts, and opera productions.

In 2014, she took on the direction of the production department at Palau de Les Arts Reina Sofía collaborating with artists such as Zubin Mehta, Davide Livermore, Paul Curran, and Gregory Kunde, among others.

Bio provided by the guest speaker.

Liz Teutsch

Director of Academic Technology; Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music's campus in Valencia, Spain

Liz Teutsch completed a Bachelor of Arts at Dartmouth College in 1999 and a four-year professional diploma in music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music’s campus in Boston. She then took on a role as a chief technical engineer and faculty member at the Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts in 2006, where she became the director of the Audio Production Department in 2008.

In January 2013, Teutsch moved to Valencia as assistant director of academic technology and associate professor at Berklee College of Music's campus in Valencia, where she was appointed director of academic technology and associate professor in June 2015. She also is the vice president of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) in the southern region of Europe and the AES chapter faculty advisor at the Valencia campus.

In addition to her career as a technologist, Teutsch has freelanced as a music producer, recording/mix engineer, audio technician, and musician.