Brian Onderdonk
Music Director
Principal Conductor
As
Music Director and Conductor for Center Stage Opera, Brian Onderdonk is extremely
proud to have had the opportunity to conduct the company’s first two seasons
and looks forward to continuing the development of the company into one of the
premiere regional opera houses in the Los Angeles area. As Music Director, he
has led the company in fully staged productions of Rossini’s La
Cambiale di Matrimonio, Donizetti’s Lucia
di Lammermoor, Mozart’s Cosi fan
tutte, Verdi’s La Traviata
and Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette,
Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, as well
as a number of orchestral and choral concerts with the company’s resident
orchestra, including Bizet's Carmen, and
Mozart's Requiem.
Since the founding of the company, Mr. Onderdonk has been particularly dedicated
to bringing music of the highest caliber to the San Fernando Valley, and looks
forward to a bright and prosperous future of achieving this goal with Center
Stage Opera.
An enthusiastic conductor of all genres, Mr. Onderdonk has a particular passion
for opera conducting, sparked three years ago by an opportunity to step in for
the ailing Music Director of the California State University Northridge Opera
Theater and conduct a live performance of Mozart’s Cosí
fan tutte with only a few hours’ notice. Since then, he has
guest conducted performances with the CSUN Opera Theater in a wide range of
repertoire, including Donizetti’s L’Elisir
d’Amore, Britten’s Albert
Herring, Strauss’ Die Fledermaus,
and Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.
Furthermore, in July 2004, he was a guest conductor for performances of Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte
with the Burgas Opera and Philharmonic Society in Bulgaria.
In addition to his work with Center Stage Opera and CSUN, Mr. Onderdonk was
recently invited to step in as guest Music Director of the UCSB Symphony Orchestra
during the Spring 2007 quarter to conduct the ensemble’s final concert
of the academic year. He has also been a regular participant at a number of
national orchestral conducting workshops and seminars, including the 2003 American
Symphony Orchestra League Workshop in Chicago and the South Carolina Conductor’s
Institute of 2003, where he worked as Conducting Fellow under Donald Portnoy
and Paul Vermel. Additionally, for the past three years he has held the Conducting
Fellowship position with the nationally acclaimed American Youth Symphony led
by Los Angeles Philharmonic Concertmaster Alexander Treger.
Brian Onderdonk holds his Master’s Degree in Conducting from California
State University Northridge, where he studied conducting with Dr. John Roscigno,
David Aks, and Gary Pratt.
