Meet Elizabeth Askren

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elizabeth Askren a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Elizabeth, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.

For me, nothing replaces commitment and consistent effort. All of my professional skills were acquired through rigorous studies and diligent training, followed by professional experience in the field. This has taken many years – even decades! – to achieve, and yet I am still very humble about what I have yet to learn and master. Once you have done the real work, confidence and self-esteem naturally follow.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Praised for “inspiring virtuosic achievements from the pit” (Opera Today) and “palpable happiness” (Le Monde), I enjoy empowering musicians around the world as a conductor, educator, and cultural activist.

My musical leadership is described by La Croix as “present on each line, each silence.” An OPERA America 2024 Opera Grant winner, I perform regularly with leading opera houses and orchestras throughout North America and Europe, including The Dallas Opera, with which I enjoy a privileged relationship as a guest conductor, master teacher, and creative producer, Hawaii Opera Theatre, of which I am the company’s first ever Principal Guest Conductor, and Chicago Lyric Opera, where I am a re-invited music staff member for the 2024-25 season.

I am also very excited to be the Music Director of composer Paola Prestini and poet Brenda Shaughnessey’s Sensorium Ex, a Ford Foundation-funded multi-modal arts project exploring issues at the intersection of AI, disability, and the human voice. Aiming to pioneer new approaches to creating opera in the 21st century, Sensorium Ex is produced by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects and enjoys support from presenting partners The Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, The Shed, and The Washington National Opera. It will receive its world premiere in May 2025.

It is so important to invest in your local community and support the next generation of thinkers, creators, and leaders. This is why, when we moved to Cluj-Napoca, I founded the Transylvanian Opera Academy (TOA), Romania’s first opera studio. Offering a 360° approach to education, TOA guides its young artists to develop holistically as mature artists, centered individuals, and ambassadors of their art to their local communities. Since its creation in 2017, TOA has been featured on national television, radio, and press, while establishing international partnerships with the Paris Opera’s Academy, the Philharmonie de Paris’ La Maestra competition, and Opera for Peace.

I believe music can bring healing and joy to everyone, so am deeply committed to sharing my art form with a broader audience – including the youngest ones! This inspired me to create the children’s edutainment series MaestraMagic!, a multimedia production combining live action, animation and puppets in a program compared to Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts series. MaestraMagic!’s Season 1 was picked up by The Dallas Opera, and was a finalist for SharkTank’s Season 15. MaestraMagic’s first comic book about Mozart’s The Magic Flute is now available on amazon.com .

A master teacher at both The Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute and at the Paris Opera’s Academy, I made history by judging the Paris Philharmonic’s inaugural La Maestra Competition for Women Conductors alongside my mentor, Marin Alsop. Passionate about sharing the craft of conducting, I now offer an innovative online masterclass series drawing on the full breadth of my practical experience and pedagogy.

I enjoy speaking about leading and entrepreneurship in the arts, mentoring young artists, and cultivating humanity in the age of AI. You can check out my TEDx talk, Why Classical Music is the Wave of the Future, which garnered more than 4,500 views in under 48 hours. My interviews are featured regularly in the American and European media, through outlets including PBS Newshour, NPR, Radio France Internationale, and France Musique.

I studied on both sides of the Atlantic, holding degrees in piano and conducting from The Juilliard School, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Conducting Institute of Bard in the United States, as well as the Schola Cantorum, the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, and the Romanian National Academy of Music Gheorghe Dima in Europe. My musical mentors include conductors Marin Alsop and Lorin Maazel, along with pianists Byron Janis and Sergio Perticaroli/Germaine Tocatlian. I was awarded terminal diplomas from both the French Ministry of Culture (VAE, certificat d’aptitude en direction d’ensembles orchestrales) and the Romanian Ministry of Education (PhD, magna cum laude) and completed administrative training from Harvard’s Kennedy School, Christie’s Education, and Paris’ Cité de la Musique.

When not performing abroad, I divide my time between New York, France and Transylvania. An enthusiastic contributor to my various local communities, I serve on educational and philanthropic boards and consult for nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and Europe.

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If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three qualities which were most important for me on my journey, both professionally and personally, are: resilience; curiosity; and love.

Resilience is key because when we experience setbacks – and we all will! – we decide whether to succumb or overcome. Resilience gives us the strength to overcome, again and again.

Curiosity is essential to foster in ourselves, and to encourage in others. Curiosity allows us to explore the unkown, to learn new things, and by extension, to grow.

Love is the underpinning of our life’s purpose. Love flows in us and through us; love unites us with our family, friends, community, and surroundings. Navigating life with love as our guide is to steer straight and true.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

Reading from original sources of quality is so important! By reading the original author’s book instead of either watching a video about the topic or reading someone’s synopsis of the material, you enter into a direct contact with the writer and their message. In music this is called “urtext”, where the composition is faithfully rendered without any comment or “amelioration” from editors. The purpose of an urtext edition is to enable the direct confrontation of the performer with the composer’s work, so that they can make their own informed decisions from the direct source.

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