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The Brazilian-born conductor, John Luciano Neschling, was in Rio de Janeiro, to a Jewish family of Austrian émigrés who left Europe escaping the rise of Nazism. His grandmother, Malvine Bodanzky, née Goldschmiedt, was a cousin of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the wife of the conductor Arthur Bodanzky. He studied in Vienna under Hans Swarowsky and Reinhold Schmid; and attended classes with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa in Tanglewood and Bruno Maderna in Europe. Later, he won several international conducting competitions.
Orchestras John Neschling has conducted include the Wiener Symphoniker, London Symphony Orchestra, Zürich Tonhalle Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, and BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. As an opera conductor he has appeared all over the world with, for example, the Wiener Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Teatro San Carlo di Napoli, Arena di Verona, Opernhaus Zürich and Washington Opera.
John Neschling has been music director at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon, the St Gallen Opera in Switzerland, the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and the Orchestre National Bordeaux-Aquitaine in France, and assistant conductor at the Wiener Staatsoper. He came back to Brazil in 1973 to assume the position of Music Director of the municipal theaters of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
In 1997 he became Principal Conductor of the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo State Symphony; = OSESP), a position he retained until 2009. During these 12 years he transformed the orchestra into the leading symphony orchstra of Latin America, touring the USA and Europe three times, and recording more than 30 acclaimed CD's, with Brazilian and international music, winning 5 Diapason d'Or and one Latin Grammy. He also organized tournées that took OSESP to play at several concert halls around the world, including the Avery Fisher Hall in New York City and at the Musikverein in Vienna. Under his request, the great hall of the old Júlio Prestes train station was renovated and turned into Sala São Paulo, the home of OSESP and one of the best concert halls in the world. It opened in 1999.
Since 2011 John Neschling has conducted concerts and opera productions in Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and Poland. In January 2013 he was appointed as Artistic Director of Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, where he was until September 2016. Since then he has been conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Maggio Musicale, La Fenice (Venice), Comunale Bologna, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Teatro Lírico de Cagliari, Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège. He has been a member of the Brazilian Academy of Music since 2003.
John Neschling is married to the writer Patricia Melo. |
