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A Very Positive Conductor
PAUL BODINE talks to Los Angeles Opera's Music Director Designate, Domingo Hindoyan
Fourteen months after announcing the retirement, in 2026, of only its second-ever music director, James Conlon, the Los Angeles Opera - often ranked among the top five US opera houses - announced his replacement: Venezuelan-Swiss Domingo Hindoyan. A protégé of Daniel Barenboim, Hindoyan, at the comparatively young age of forty-five, has already built a respected career. Currently chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra - his contract there ends 2028 - Hindoyan has guest-conducted with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestra in the United Kingdom and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic in the United States. His seven recordings with the Royal Liverpool - the UK's oldest continuing professional orchestra, founded 1840 - have ranged widely from stalwarts - Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and Debussy - to the (lesser-known) Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra, Frenchman Albert Roussel, etc and to imaginative thematic releases such as 'Venezuela! Music from the Americas!' and 'Childhood Tales' with British pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason. A release focusing on Cuban music is in the works.
Like Gustavo Dudamel (music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and in 2026 of the New York Philharmonic) and Rafael Payare (music director, San Diego Symphony/Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal), Hindoyan is a product of Venezuela's formidable El Sistema music education program.
Domingo Hindoyan. Photo © 2025 Chelsea Lauren / LA Opera
Speaking from Los Angeles on 5 June 2024, Hindoyan admitted to being 'very close friends' with his two conducting compatriots:
Gustavo and I have been friends for a long time in Venezuela, when we were teenagers. We used to play the violin together, also with Rafael.
Of the three, Hindoyan can claim the richer musical pedigree: his father, Domingo Garcia, was concertmaster and president of Orquesta Sinfonica Venezuela, Venezuela's oldest orchestra. When asked whether his father's leadership roles factored into his own music leadership, he said:
I have to admit, I have a very good example at home. My father is someone who really put his passion for music into a great discipline and of course, he was president of [the] orchestra. The Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra was self-managed by the musicians and he was concert master for many years. He was also the president [when they made a] beautiful tour around the world. [It] was one of the most important orchestras at the time.
Hindoyan also shares with Dudamel and Payare a versatility that opens doors. Trained as a violinist, he was admitted at twenty-five into Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra on the strength of his mother's Syrian roots - her Armenian-Turkish family settled in Aleppo. After seven years playing together, Barenboim learned of Hindoyan's interest in conducting and invited him to attend master classes, observe rehearsals, and do soundchecks. This led to his 2013 audition with Staatskapelle Berlin, the resident orchestra of Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden, where Barenboim was general music director.
Three years as Barenboim's conducting assistant/apprentice positioned Hindoyan to seek conducting opportunities with both opera companies and symphony orchestras. As Barenboim's own career attests, such switch-hitting is far from atypical, at least at the rarefied heights that Hindoyan is entering - witness Toscanini, von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, etc:
I think it's more common [now]. I was assistant in Berlin for many years of Mr Daniel Barenboim [so], I had that example, and he did that at Chicago Symphony and Berlin Staatsoper for many years, and many other conductors do that - [Yannick] Nézet-Séguin, at New York's Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra [for example]. I think it's just [about] being a musician. I'm a violin player, and I love and I really care about symphonic repertoire as much as I do of the opera repertoire. I have [a] special love for the voices and for the stage music. So I'm very lucky to have a beautiful symphony orchestra in England, and to be the incoming music director of the LA opera.
If luck is a factor in Hindoyan's increasingly global career, it's secondary to his intelligence, hard-earned skill, energy and charisma. When he made his LA Opera debut last November with Gounod's Romeo and Juliet, Seen and Heard International praised Hindoyan's 'assured' ability to 'draw the best from the orchestra' while Indulge Magazine praised his 'meticulous control'. After complimenting Hindoyan as 'a conductor of remarkable eloquence who understood movement in all its musical aspects', Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed went one step further: 'Does this signal that he is a candidate to succeed Music Director James Conlon, who steps down in 2026?'
As it happened, yes.
Domingo Hindoyan. Photo © Chris Christodoulou
Notwithstanding operatic music directors' unique collaboration with stage directors, choreographers, and designers; vocal coaching and rehearsing; pit-versus-stage cue coordination, etc, Hindoyan rejects the idea that operatic leadership is more challenging:
I'm not so sure it's more demanding. It's just maybe a little bit different, because, of course, the symphony orchestra, we have only the orchestra itself. Here [LA Opera] is a little bit larger, in the sense that there are the guest singers, stage directors and it's a bigger machine, of course, but the music and the scores are the same. It's not so different at the end.
Given that opera seasons must be planned years in advance, when does Hindoyan expect to put his personal imprint on the Los Angeles Opera?
My first season [2026-27] is almost done already with the pieces that we [will] conduct, and then we are already working on the following seasons. Because it's very important to work in advance for many reasons. First of all, to book the best singers, to book the best guest conductors, to organize, actually, my own calendar. But more than that is to really have a concept which is my own perspective, my own wishes, together with the personality of the house, the requirements of the community and the LA Opera audience - to bring something that will excite everyone from early age to the traditional audience.
To go now into details would be too early, in my opinion, but, for instance, I love [Richard] Strauss. Strauss will come back, or will come often, and Italian opera, I'll do a lot. [Conlon does Italian] as well. He is a big Verdi conductor. So I will follow that. My responsibility at first is to honor that, and then in terms of repertoire, there will be, of course, some little changes. I will conduct Verdi, Puccini, verismo, and I have love for French and German as well. So this is a very wide repertoire that I have, as [it] should be for a music director of any opera house.
When I invited Hindoyan to disclose where he might like to take programming at LA Opera, he responded:
It's where I've been going [so far]. What I like to do is to take care of the big traditions, but also explore new things. Music has always been like this. That was [what] the great composers used to do. They will study the old ones, and at the same time, invent new things. And me, as a conductor, and especially being a music director, my responsibility is to present to the audience our art form in the best way. We have to tell them, 'This is where we are going, and you also can enjoy what we did before'. So it's all this beautiful balance. I love the word balance because I think that's where it should be: bold ideas together with the great traditions - all together, you can build something unique.
Despite his globe-trotting commitments, Hindoyan doesn't neglect the study of new scores.
I find the time. I have time especially booked for that, weeks that are empty, especially to study, to learn new things. And I also do it while I'm doing another production. If I'm conducting an opera, it lasts two months. Now, very soon, I will be at the Paris Opera [Verdi's 'Rigoletto', Opéra national de Paris, 8 June 2025]. The whole period takes two months together. So there's a lot of time. I love it. There's a lot of time between performances to learn new pieces, to listen [to] new music, to read new scores. I get emails and scores from new young composers or young living composers. I like to go and explore them. That's what I do, [on] trains, planes, everywhere ... all the time.
While the Los Angeles Opera's last conventional recording was John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles (Pentatone), in 2016, as recently as last July it experimented with a nine-camera live simulcast of Puccini's Madame Butterfly on large LED screens at El Cariso Community Regional Park and the Santa Monica Pier. Hindoyan seems open to anything.
In terms of recording LA Opera, [it's] something that we have to study. We will work on it. Personally, I have a lot with my current symphony orchestra in Liverpool. We have two recordings every season. I have a beautiful project of music of the Americas with Liverpool Philharmonic and even one opera in the plans in the near future. You will hear about it. So [if] I'm lucky, I'll try to do it in LA as well.
Domingo Hindoyan. Photo © 2025 Chelsea Lauren / LA Opera
As for opera's future, Hindoyan is an optimist.
I'm a very positive conductor. When I go to Europe, I see a lot of people excited about it. I think it's [in] good health. Of course, we have the responsibility as an organization to take care of it, to do good quality music, to present it well, to market it properly to the people, to sell it well, and to invest time in education, to take it out to the community. Then they will come back to us. This will help to hold what we have, even to make it grow more excellent.
Copyright © 10 June 2025
Paul Bodine,
San Diego, USA