Anthony Parnther is music director and conductor of the San Bernardino Symphony and the Southeast Symphony & Chorus in Los Angeles. He has conducted artists spanning every musical genre, including Joshua Bell, Jessye Norman, Yundi Li, Lynn Harrell, Frederica von Stade, Roderick Williams, Canadian Brass, Jennifer Holliday, Kanye West, Imagine Dragons, Omar Apollo, RY X, and Alan Walker.

Parnther’s recent guest conducting engagements include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Opera, Mann Center Festival Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia, Jacaranda—Music at the Edge, Hear Now Music Festival, Pittsburgh Microtonal Music Festival, Hollywood Chamber Orchestra, Brightwork NewMusic, and World Opera Forum in Madrid. He has premiered or recorded works by Anthony Davis, George Walker, Florence Price, Zenobia Powell Perry, Errollyn Wallen, John Wineglass, Gary Powell Nash, Marian Harrison, Renee Baker, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, James Wilson, Philip Herbert, Daniel Kidane, Chanda Dancy, and James Newton.

This season, Parnther appears with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, Austin Symphony Orchestra, and Symphony of Northwest Arkansas. He also premieres Kris Bowers’s Concerto for Horn with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Tamar-kali Brown’s We Hold These Truths with LA Opera in addition to working alongside Anthony Davis on his Pulitzer Prize–winning opera Central Park Five.

Parnther has led the Hollywood Studio Symphony in recording sessions for international feature film, television, and video game projects, including Encanto, Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, Tenet, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, League of Legends, Arcane, American Dad, Cheaper By the Dozen, The Lost City, The Adam Project, Little, The Hunt, Fargo, The Way Back, The Night Of, and 4400.

In addition to conducting, Parnther is an active bassoonist and contrabassoonist, and has recorded on an extensive list of film and television soundtracks by Hollywood’s preeminent composers, including John Williams, Terence Blanchard, Alexandre Desplat, Danny Elfman, Bruce Broughton, Michael Giacchino, Mychael Danna, Ludwig Göransson, David Newman, John Powell, Alan Silvestri, and Hans Zimmer. Recent performance projects include Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker, The Simpsons, Animaniacs, Looney Tunes, Family Guy, The Lion King, Coming 2 America, Mulan, Empire, The Kominsky Method, Only Murders in the Building, Moana, Suicide Squad, and Star Trek Beyond.

Parnther studied at Northwestern University and Yale University, and resides in Los Angeles.

Jon Batiste is one of the world’s greatest musicians, and one of the most celebrated and limitless creative forces of his generation. Batiste has won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for scoring the Disney/Pixar film Soul. To date, he has received 14 Grammy nominations—11 in one year, which is the second most in history—and several honorary doctorate and lifetime achievement awards. At the most recent Grammy ceremony, Batiste earned five awards, including Album of the Year for We Are. He has performed to acclaim around the world and is premiering his American Symphony in May as a part of his 2021–2022 Carnegie Hall Perspectives series. Batiste is grateful to put on display his artistic philosophy of “social music,” which is about bringing music back to its roots within community, defying genre constructs and live performance as a spiritual practice.

The Gateways Orchestra is an ensemble of the Gateways Music Festival, a weeklong series of chamber music concerts, solo recitals, panel discussions, talks, film screenings, and more. Founded in 1993 by acclaimed concert pianist Armenta Hummings Dumisani in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the festival relocated to Rochester, New York, in 1995 when Ms. Dumisani was appointed to the faculty of the Eastman School of Music.

The festival’s mission is to connect and support professional classical musicians of African descent, and enlighten and inspire communities through the power of performance. Gateways has become an artistic home for Black classical musicians and a welcoming destination for audiences of all backgrounds and ages.

Michael Morgan served as music director and conductor of the Gateways Orchestra from its inception in 1993 until his untimely passing in 2021. Musicians of the Gateways Orchestra are players in leading symphony orchestras, faculty of prominent music schools and conservatories, and active freelancers. They come from across United States as well as Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia, and various islands of the Caribbean.

The orchestra’s repertoire covers major works from the Classical, Romantic, 20th-century, and modern periods with a special emphasis on large-scale works by composers of African descent, including Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; Florence Price; William Levi Dawson; Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson; George Walker; Olly Wilson; Adolphus Hailstork; Michael Abels; James V. Cockerham; and Carlos Simon.

Renowned musicians who have performed with the orchestra include pianists Paul Badura-Skoda, Stewart Goodyear, Awadagin Pratt, and Terrence Wilson; clarinetist Anthony McGill; French hornists Jerome Ashby and Robert Lee Watt; violinists Brendon Elliott, Kelly Hall-Tompkins, and Tai Murray; cellists Donald White and Owen Young; harpist Ann Hobson Pilot; vocalists Denyce Graves, George Shirley, and William Warfield; and others.

The New York City and Carnegie Hall 2022 debuts of the Gateways Orchestra represent the Gateways Festival’s launch as a touring organization with annual performances planned for cities across the country.