by Kyle Macmillan
Ezra Calvino’s big ah-ha moment came when they were in high school and attended a talk before a Phoenix Symphony concert with Joanne Falletta, during which the guest conductor spoke about her pioneering role in a profession that had all but excluded women for decades.
The aspiring violist had never given much thought to this discrimination, and it planted a seed in their mind about a possible future direction for their career. “I went home,” Calvino said, “and started looking up things and I was like, ‘This is crazy.’ At the time I was really into girl power and empowering young women, so it caught hold and I began thinking about it.”
Now 28, Calvino (who uses the pronouns they/them) is in the beginning stages of a professional career as a conductor and will be taking part in the 2026 edition of the Colorado Music Festival’s Festival Fellows Program along with the Amara Quartet. The program provides mentorship and performance opportunities to outstanding emerging artists from underrepresented backgrounds.
Among their activities at the festival, the young conductor will lead Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale as part of a July 28 chamber music program featuring members of the CMF Orchestra. The 1918 theatrical work, which draws on the Russian folktale, The Runaway Soldier and the Devil, is scored for a septet with an unusual instrumentation—violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet (or trumpet), trombone and percussion.
In addition, Calvino will conduct the Overture from Giuseppe Verdi’s 1861 opera, La forza del destino, to lead off the CMF Orchestra’s August 6 and 7 concerts, which will also include Music Director Peter Oundjian helming the world premiere of Valerie Coleman’s Concerto for Piano No. 1 and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
The overture is one of the festival fellow’s favorite selections. “It’s really multifaceted: sad but dramatic, exciting, all within a nice little opener,” they said. “I really like the variety I feel I can express in it.”
From Music Lover to Conductor
Calvino grew up in a suburb of Phoenix, the child of avid fans of music of myriad kinds. “There were CDs around the house all the time,” they said, “and when I ran out of those CDs to listen to, I was pretty avid at the library, and I would get more CDs.” When they were 5 or 6, they went to a Phoenix Symphony concert featuring Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and they knew immediately that they wanted to be a musician.
The family had to move to a different school district with an orchestra program so that Calvino could join in the fourth grade and start studying the viola. That initial interest was quickly validated when Calvino opened their instrument case and a thrill washed over them. The budding musician was soon practicing as much as possible to accelerate their entrance into the school’s advanced orchestra.
Calvino went on in 2020 to earn a bachelor’s degree in viola performance from Arizona State University, but their interest in conducting stayed strong after that encounter with Falletta. They even bought the full scores for the works that they played in three different youth orchestras in high school so they could get a taste of the kind of complete study of a composition that conductors have to do. Calvino subsequently pursued two master’s degrees in conducting, just finishing their second one in May at Yale University.
Building a Career and Breaking Barriers
finishing their second one in May at Yale University.
Calvino has already managed to snag some small conducting jobs, including Music Director of the New Haven Chamber Orchestra and Guest Conductor of the San Gabriel Valley (California) Symphony. In between their master’s programs, they served for a year as Associate Conductor of Sistema Ravinia, which is patterned on Venezuela’s renowned Il Sistema music education system. Operating under the auspices of the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, a suburb just outside of Chicago, the program serves 250 primarily Black and Latino elementary- and middle-school children in Waukegan, and the Austin and Lawndale neighborhoods in Chicago.
The young conductor is looking for their first full-time post, having made it to the final round of auditions for assistant conductor with several major orchestras, including the Seattle and New Jersey symphonies. Though Calvino has not landed such a post yet, they remain optimistic. “It is a competition but I think it’s a matter of time,” they said. “It’s always tough, not being a man and seeing men consistently claiming spots.”
In the meantime, Calvino plans to piece together a living around their current engagements, like the Colorado stint. At Yale, Calvino was a student of Oundjian, and with his ties to the CMF, he invited them to audition for its fellowship program, and they were delighted to do so. They actually know Colorado well, having spent summers with their grandfather in Fort Collins and traveled to Boulder for skiing in the winter. “I often find that place and music are connected in ways that we can’t really explain, so hearing about CMF being in Boulder, I thought, ‘Oh, music has got to be so magical out there.’ I was extremely pleased to be invited.’”
After departing the CMA on August 10, Calvino travels to the Peninsula Music Festival in northern Wisconsin, where she returns for her second season as Assistant Conductor under Music Director and Conductor Rune Bergmann. “It’s beautiful,” they said. “The people [in the orchestra] are so friendly and extremely talented. I’m super inspired by the music director.”
A Vision for the Future
nspired by the words of Falletta more than a decade ago, Calvino decided to become a conductor not just to make music but also to do their part to help transform the field. “I felt that there wasn’t enough artistic agency as simply a violist,” they said, “and there would be more afforded to me as a conductor. I wanted to help change things for me and my friends, to help classical music be more inclusive and welcoming to everyone.”
In Boulder, Calvino takes important early steps toward reaching that goal.