Joseph Swensen

Joseph Swensen
Born	1960
Era	Contemporary

Joseph Swensen is a conductor, violinist, and composer. He is winner of awards, including the Leventritt Foundation Sponsorship Award and the Avery Fisher Career Award. In 2000, Swensen was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. In 2014, he gave a TedX talk with the title “Habitats for Music and the Sound of Math” about music education and the developing brain, at the New York Institute of Technology.

Joseph Swensen was born in 1960 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and grew up in Harlem, New York City. His mother was Japanese-American and his father Norwegian-American. He studied music at the Juilliard School, where his teachers included Dorothy DeLay.

Until his thirties, Swensen's career was as a violin soloist. He performed in major cultural centres, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, as well as in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. During his early career as an exclusive recording artist with BMG Classics, he recorded the major violin concerto repertoire with conductors such as André Previn. More recently, he has recorded as soloist with The Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He now combines a career as soloist and chamber musician with that of conducting.

Swensen currently holds the post of Conductor Emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, where he was Principal Conductor from 1996-2005 during which time Swensen and the orchestra followed a regular concert schedule in Scotland and toured extensively in the UK,Europe, US, and the Far East. They also performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, Tanglewood and Ravinia Festivals, the BBC Proms, the Barbican, and the Concertgebouw, and recorded for Linn Records. From 2006 - 2011, he was music director with Malmő Opera and is guest conductor for a number of UK, European and American orchestras.

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