Baton in Hand, BU’s Sarah Ioannides Inspires a New Generation of Musicians
Conductor is renowned for collaboration, innovation, and championing new music
Baton in Hand, BU’s Sarah Ioannides Inspires a New Generation of Musicians
Conductor is renowned for collaboration, innovation, and championing new music
This feature on Sarah Ioannides was first published in BU Today on March 26, 2025. Video by Gave Davis. Text by John O’Rourke. Photo by Eric Haynes
EXCERPT
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Sarah Ioannides was destined to become a conductor. She comes from a long line (eight generations) of musicians and composers, dating back to 1750. Her father is a conductor and composer and her mother was an accomplished singer and flutist. “Before I can remember, music was part of me,” says Ioannides, who arrived at BU in September 2024 as the College of Fine Arts director of orchestral activities and an associate professor in orchestral conducting. “My father was conducting opera and the Canberra [Australia] Choral Society when I was in my mother’s womb. My mother sang in the choir. I was born listening to music. And as a child, I was more interested in sitting in front of the record player than playing outside with other kids. I had this very curious mind and attraction to musical sound right from the beginning.”
Ioannides, who was born in Australia and earned degrees at Oxford University and the Juilliard School, has won international praise as a conductor. She was the first woman to hold a full-time conducting position with the renowned Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and over the course of a career that has taken her to six continents, she has conducted such acclaimed ensembles as the Tonkünstler, the Orchestre Nationale de Lyon, the Royal Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony, earning a reputation for innovative programming and superb musicianship. The New York Times, reviewing one of her concerts, cited her “unquestionable strength and authority,” and the Los Angeles Times named her “one of six female conductors breaking the glass podium.”
For Ioannides, the opportunity to lead BU’s orchestral activities and to work with students earning their doctorate degrees in conducting offered another gift: immersing herself fully in the music she loves. “The ability to reach into the art of what I’m doing on a deeper level is why I’m here,” she says. “It’s a chance to really soak in our art form and the repertoire and talk about it with our DMA and master’s conductors. Bringing my understanding and experience to this kind of setting is very enriching.”
As director of orchestral activities, she oversees 160 students who make up the orchestras that accompany the School of Music and Opera Institute as well as the school’s top soloists and composers. It is demanding work for the students, and for Ioannides, who is always looking for opportunities to nurture individual musicians.
read more about sarah in bu today
BU AT SYMPHONY HALL
On March 31, Ioannides will be center stage for her most public performance yet at BU—a concert at Symphony Hall. She will conduct the BU Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Richard Strauss’ Suite from Der Ronsekavalier and the Symphony Orchestra and Symphonic Chorus in Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2. The concert, an annual CFA event, will also feature Daniel Parsley, a CFA assistant professor in choral conducting and director of choral activities, conducting the orchestra and Symphonic Chorus in Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and composer and performer Kenneth Amis (CFA’91), a CFA lecturer in tuba, leading the BU Wind Ensemble in Arnold Rosner’s Symphony No. 8, Op. 84, “Trinity.”