Leon Botstein has been music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992. He is also music director of The Orchestra Now, an innovative training orchestra composed of top musicians from around the world. He is co-artistic director of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, which take place at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, where he was president from 1975-2026. Mr. Botstein is also active as a guest conductor and can be heard on numerous recordings with the London Symphony (including a GRAMMY nominated recording of Popov’s First Symphony), the London Philharmonic, NDR-Hamburg, and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Botstein has revived numerous neglected operas, creating once-in-a-lifetime experiences for concertgoers and global audiences. Including rare repertoire such as Schoenberg’s massive Gurre-Lieder and the accompanying short-film, which documented the monumental undertaking, Strauss’s first opera, Guntram, and the U.S. Premiere of Sergei Taneyev’s final work, At the Reading of a Psalm. His recording of Paul Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner with the ASO was named one of the top recordings of 2015 by several publications, and his recent recording of Gershwin piano music with the Royal Philharmonic was hailed by The Guardian and called “something special…in a crowded field” by Musicweb International. He is a prolific author and music historian and the recipient of numerous honors for his contributions to the music industry. In 2019, The New York Times named Leon Botstein a “champion of overlooked works…who has tirelessly worked to bring to light worthy scores by neglected composers.”