Angel Gil-Ordóñez

Angel Gil-Ordóñez is the Music Director and Conductor of the PostClassical Ensemble. As a child, he watched spellbound at Madrid’s Teatro Real as Sergiu Celibidache led the London Symphony Orchestra in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Awed by the legendary conductor’s sorcerer’s passion, galvanized by the transparency of sound magically elicited, Gil-Ordóñez resolved that he would become a symphonic conductor. Seven years later, in 1985, he moved to Munich to study with Celibidache – a relationship that would last eight years.

Celibidache’s mentorship ultimately inspired Gil-Ordóñez to co-found PostClassical Ensemble with music historian Joseph Horowitz — one of his proudest achievements. The ethos of PostClassical combines Horowitz’s visionary programming with a tireless pursuit of transcendent listening experiences. Treating performance as a “laboratory for musical thought experiments,” the Ensemble has been heralded as “one of the country’s most innovative music groups” (Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post).

Gil-Ordóñez also serves as a Guest Conductor of New York’s Perspectives Ensemble and Music Director of the Georgetown University Orchestra in Washington, D.C. Additionally, he serves as advisor for education and programming for Trinitate Philharmonia, a program in León, Mexico, modeled on Venezuela’s El Sistema. He has appeared as guest conductor with the American Composers Orchestra, Opera Colorado, the Pacific Symphony, the Hartford Symphony, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Abroad, he has conducted the Munich Philharmonic, the Solistes de Berne, at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, and at the Bellas Artes National Theatre in Mexico City. Gil-Ordóñez is the former Associate Conductor of the National  Orchestra of Spain. He has recorded four albums devoted to Spanish composers.