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In her debut concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 3-4, Daniela Candillari will conduct music that spans the 18th through 21st centuries, bringing together a rare combination of soloists: soprano, mezzo-soprano and piccolo. Opening with Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the program continues with Thea Musgrave’s Piccolo Play, featuring CSO piccolo Jennifer Gunn, and concludes with G.B. Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. This eclectic repertoire showcases several areas of expertise for Candillari, who has established herself as a conductor with an affinity for contemporary music and an ability to move seamlessly between operatic and symphonic podiums.
Raised in Serbia and Slovenia, Candillari first encountered vocal music through her grandmother, who was an opera singer and voice teacher. “I grew up in an opera house, and so that was really my first love,” she said in a recent interview. Trained as a pianist, Candillari earned a master’s degree in jazz studies from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. However, she was drawn to conducting through her work as a vocal coach at IU; her first experience conducting a choir occurred when she moved back to Slovenia.
Since returning to the United States 12 years ago, Candillari has maintained an active career as both an opera and orchestra conductor; currently, she is the principal conductor at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. In her opera work, she especially enjoys the collaborative process, the storytelling aspect and the opportunity to get insights into different cultures. As someone who speaks English, French, German, Italian, Serbian and Slovenian, she also loves the connection between language and music in opera.
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, a 1736 setting of a sacred Latin text, was one of the first pieces Candillari worked on during her transition into conducting. She later conducted a staged version in New York and “got really ingrained in the text,” she recalled. Scored for a chamber orchestra and two vocalists, the piece “leans into the Baroque opera tradition,” said Candillari. Its 12 short movements have a minimalist structure, but together, they create “this complete arc that is quite operatic.”
Soprano Giulia Semenzato and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano will perform as soloists in the upcoming CSO concerts. “I love the color combination of soprano and mezzo-soprano singing together; they each bring such an enhancement of the inner voices or outer voices of the string section,” Candillari said. “It’s incredibly vivid orchestral writing. It’s really the sound world that Pergolesi created with the chamber orchestra, including an organ, and it’s the intimacy of the piece that I’m just in love with.”
This sense of intimacy is a throughline of the entire program, the conductor added, noting that both the Barber and Musgrave works originated as chamber music. Composed in 1936, the Adagio for Strings is an arrangement of the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11, while Piccolo Play is a 2021 orchestration of a piece that Musgrave originally wrote for piccolo and piano in 1989.
Simon’s Fate Now Conquers, which premiered in 2020, takes inspiration from an intimate piece of musical history: an 1815 journal entry by Ludwig van Beethoven. Quoting from The Iliad, the passage reads, “But Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share / In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit / And that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.”
In Fate Now Conquers, Simon uses “the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony” to compose “musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate,” the composer writes.
Piccolo Play also makes a “nod to the past,” Candillari said; its seven movements are named after harpsichord pieces by François Couperin, a French Baroque composer. “To me, the piece has very strong French impressionistic colors to it,” she said. Like the Stabat Mater, the short movements are “woven together” into “a beautiful arc.”
It’s fitting that the two most recent works on the program share this connection to earlier composers. Candillari has conducted many contemporary works in her opera career, including Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones at Lyric Opera of Chicago and the world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded at Washington National Opera. One of her favorite aspects of conducting contemporary music is being able to speak with the composers, and these collaborative experiences also influence her approach to classical pieces.
“I always think that traditional repertoire and contemporary repertoire feed off each other,” she said. “I think the more we do contemporary repertoire, the more we realize that when we do a Dvořák symphony, that we’re walking with craftspeople; we’re not walking with gods. It makes those traditional pieces a lot more personal, in a way, and treated as a craft, as opposed to something that is unreachable.”
During the 2025/26 season, Candillari will continue to blend contemporary and traditional repertoire in her symphonic and operatic engagements, which include debuts with the Canadian Opera Company, London Philharmonic and Liverpool Philharmonic. With a busy season ahead, she looks forward to her fall debut with the CSO and the chance to work with soloists Gunn, Semenzato and Cano.
“I’ve been a fan of the CSO for as long as I can remember, and every time I was in Chicago — I came to do three productions at Lyric Opera of Chicago — I would always find an evening off when I could go and listen to the CSO,” she said. “I just love the sound of that orchestra. It’s an incredibly beautiful and honest sound.”
