PETER PEYMAN FARZINPOUR
CONDUCTOR | COMPOSER | MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER
PETER PEYMAN FARZINPOUR
Peter Peyman Farzinpour enjoys a diverse career as a conductor, composer, multimedia producer, music professor, and arts entrepreneur. He is currently the Executive / Artistic Director and Conductor of the new music and multimedia group, ENSEMBLE / PARALLAX and Sinfonietta Notturna, as well as Director of Farzinpour Creative Music & Multimedia Ventures. He has traveled and conducted throughout major concert halls in the United States, Canada, and throughout Europe where he has conducted in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Czechia, and Bulgaria. He is equally at home with the classics, as well as with adventurous, avant-garde music, much of which he has commissioned and premiered, not to mention world, pop and rock music (where he got his start as an electric guitarist!). A hallmark of many of his performances are collaborations with world-renowned multimedia and video artists, as well as choreographers and dance companies. His group, ENSEMBLE / PARALLAX, has become the first music ensemble to commission and perform each of its compositions with a new, multimedia work created exclusively for the given composition and concert.
Farzinpour started his career with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and continued as Director of New Music with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he was responsible for creating highly innovative concerts that were awarded first place by ASCAP/Chamber Music America for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. He has previously also served as Music Director and Conductor of Erato Philharmonia in Los Angeles, which was dedicated to performing standard and contemporary classical repertoire alongside multimedia, dance, and live painting. He has also served as the Music Director and Conductor of the Rivers Symphony Orchestra and the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra in Massachusetts, and has also held the position of Conductor in Residence with Opera Cabal, with which he led the world staged premiere of the Georg Friedrich Haas opera ATTHIS at the Kitchen in NYC. The sold-out performances were hailed as a “mesmerizing production” by the New York Times.
In addition to the symphonic orchestras he's conducted across the world, he has also led numerous contemporary music concerts at the Berklee College of Music, Tufts University, Miami University in Ohio, Eastern Connecticut State University, Rhode Island College, Syracuse University, the famed venue National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY, at the Conservatoire Maurice Ravel in Paris, and with two of Italy’s foremost new music groups, the Divertimento Ensemble and the MDI Ensemble of Milan. As a professor, he has held positions at the Berklee College of Music in Boston as well as UMass Dartmouth, where he has taught everything ranging from conducting, composition, music theory and history, to the Art of Rock & Roll.
Farzinpour’s own compositional activity is evidenced by performances of his works throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe by groups such as the MDI, Cygnus, and Janus Ensembles, the June in Buffalo Chamber Orchestra, the St. Matthews Chamber Orchestra, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Verdi String Quartet, the Empyrean Ensemble, by pianist Leonard Stein in the Piano Spheres series, at the Conservatoire Maurice Ravel in Paris, at the Tufts University Festival of Contemporary Music, and on numerous occasions at the Berklee College of Music.
Farzinpour is the recipient of numerous awards such as the prestigious Berklee Faculty Fellowship, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) Artists Grant for three consecutive years, the Fellowship Merit Award in Music Composition from RISCA, multiple grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as grants from the American Composers Forum, and Faculty Development and Recording Grants from the Berklee College of Music. He has been a composer in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada.
Farzinpour has also served as a lecturer and pre-concert speaker for the Pasadena Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was the Manager of the Education and Community Programs. He holds a B.M. in classical guitar performance from the Peabody Conservatory, a B.A. in English Literature from the Johns Hopkins University, and an M.A. in composition from U.C. Davis. He did post-graduate studies in Italy, where he studied conducting with Emilio Pomarico and Sandro Gorli, and composition with Giacomo Manzoni. He has also studied conducting with Gustav Meier at the International Conductors Workshop.