Michael Lewanski
BIO
Education
BA Yale University
Diploma St. Petersburg State Conservatory - Russia
Courses Taught
DePaul Concert Orchestra
Ensemble 20+
About
Conductor, curator, educator, and writer Michael Lewanski is a champion of new and old musics. He seeks to facilitate engaged connections between audiences, musicians, composers, and the music that is part of their culture, society, and history. His work hopes to be part of collective, systemic change in the classical music industry. Based in Chicago, he is Conductor of Ensemble Dal Niente, Artistic Director of Lakeview Orchestra, and Associate Professor and Chair of the Performance Studies Department at the DePaul University School of Music, where he works to train the next generation of musicians to be thoughtful artistic citizens.
Michael was Curatorial Director of Ear Taxi Festival 2021, a festival of 21st century Chicago music. He was resident conductor of the 2017 and 2019 SoundSCAPE Festivals in Italy. His guest conducting engagements have been wide-ranging and stylistically diverse, including work with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW Series, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Lyric Unlimited, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan, Ensamble CEPROMUSIC (Mexico City), the Seattle Modern Orchestra, and many others. He has led hundreds of world premieres. At the 2012 Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (Germany), Ensemble Dal Niente won the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize under his direction.
Michael has an extensive discography on major European and US labels as both conductor and producer. A native of Savannah, Georgia, he studied piano and violin in his youth. He made his conducting debut at age 13, leading his own composition. At 16, he was accepted into the conducting class of the legendary Ilya Musin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He attended Yale University; he subsequently studied with the late Cliff Colnot (with whom he worked as conducting assistant at the Civic Orchestra of Chicago from 2010 to 2014) and Lucas Vis.
Michael’s annual schedule includes concerts with DePaul School of Music Ensembles, Ensemble Dal Niente (concerts at the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, residencies at Brown, Brandeis, Harvard, Northwestern, and University of Chicago), Lakeview Orchestra, guest conducting engagements throughout the US and abroad, recording projects, and festival appearances. He respectfully acknowledges the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, Ho-Chunk, Myaaamia, Menominee, Peoria, and Illinois Confederacy among other tribal nations as custodians of the traditional Native land on which he lives and works.