Michael Morgan

Artistic Director and Music Director

Michael Morgan, who has been at Festival Opera for more than a decade, was born in Washington, DC, where he attended public schools and began conducting at the age of 12. While a student at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, he spent a summer at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, studying with Gunther Schuller and Seiji Ozawa. It was during this summer that he first worked with Leonard Bernstein.

In addition to his duties at Festival Opera, Maestro Morgan serves as Music Director of Oakland East Bay Symphony, Artistic Director of Oakland Youth Orchestra, Music Director of Sacramento Philharmonic,  and teaches the graduate conducting course at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (where, as a guest conductor, he led last year's production of Dialogues of the Carmelites). At Festival Opera he has conducted productions La Traviata, La Boheme, Il Trovatore, Tosca, Candide, The Barber of Seville.

His professional opera debut came in 1982 at the Vienna State Opera (Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio) and he has appeared with St. Louis Opera Theater, Washington National Opera, and the Berliner Staatsoper in operas of Mozart. He was a conductor at New York City Opera during the Beverly Sills-Sergiu Commissiona era and apprentice to Julius Rudel at the Buffalo Philharmonic. At Oberlin Conservatory he studied with Robert Baustian, one of the early conductors at the Santa Fe Opera.

As Stage Director, he has led productions of the Bernstein Mass at the Oakland East Bay Symphony and stagings of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Gounod's Faust at Festival Opera. As a chamber musician (piano) he has appeared on the Chamber Music Alive

From 1986 until 1992 he was Assistant Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a post for which he was chosen by Sir Georg Solti. In 1986 he was also invited by Leonard Bernstein to make his New York Philharmonic debut. Other orchestras he has guest conducted include the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Washington National Symphony, Houston Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony, Atlanta Symphony and Alabama Symphony.

He was honored by the San Francisco Chapter of The Recording Academy with the 2005 Governor's Award for Community Service. On the opposite coast, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) chose Morgan as one of its five 2005 Concert Music Award recipients. . The San Francisco Foundation has honored him with one of its Community Leadership Awards and he received an Honorary Doctorate from Holy Names University.

He makes many appearances in the nation's schools each year, particularly in the East Bay, and is highly regarded as a champion of arts education and minority access to the arts, serving several times as the conductor for the Sphinx Competition for African American and Latino String Players.  He serves on the Board of the Purple Silk Music Education Foundation as well as the International House at the University of California at Berkeley. He makes his home in Oakland with his mother and sister.