The New York Times
By Michael Cooper
July 2, 2018
Like many courtships, this one was sealed with a ring.
The Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, had left an operatic post this spring at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, amid administrative and political upheaval. The Zurich Opera House came calling.
“I said, ‘Do you want to be my chief conductor?’” Andreas Homoki, the artistic director in Zurich, recalled recently. Then he offered Mr. Noseda the icing on the cake: “I said, ‘Do you wanted to do the ‘Ring’ with me?’”
Mr. Noseda thought it over, and decided that the chance to conduct Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle for the first time, in a new production, was impossible to refuse.
“It is difficult to resist when a new ‘Ring’ is on the table,” Mr. Noseda said in a telephone interview.
Within a few days he had agreed to take the job. Mr. Noseda will become the next general music director in Zurich in 2021, the company announced on Monday, and will begin a new “Ring,” directed by Mr. Homoki, in the spring of 2022.
Mr. Noseda will succeed Fabio Luisi, the former principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, who is leaving Zurich to become the next music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
It is the rare case of musical chairs in which everybody gets a seat. Mr. Homoki, whose Zurich contract runs through 2025, said that Mr. Noseda’s unexpected departure for Torino had come just at the right moment: “Normally all the good conductors are committed.”