Conductor James Gaffigan tries to keep an emphasis on the music of America

After a series of prominent posts in Europe, including his current role of general music director of the Komische Oper Berlin in Germany, James Gaffigan will become music director of the Houston Grand Opera in 2027-28.

“I wanted to have an opportunity to have a real legacy in the United States,” said the New York-born conductor. “So far, the things that have come up and the open positions, they were all interesting in their own way, but the Houston Grand Opera was the healthiest institution financially, and they seemed to want to grow the most.”

Even as he has spent much of his career working in Europe, Gaffigan, 46, has regularly returned to the United States for guest-conducting runs; he also has always maintained American music as one of the pillars of his repertoire.

Indeed, the music of his homeland will be showcased June 11-13 when he joins the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a program for America 250: A Musical Journey, a monthlong series of Symphony Center events marking the semiquincentennial of the United States.

While that offering has long been on the schedule, the CSO announced April 8 that Gaffigan also will fill in May 21-23 for conductor Pekka Kuusisto, who has  suspended his travels to the United States.

Three of the works that had been originally scheduled still will be performed: Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Anna Clyne’s Sound and Fury (a CSO debut) and Fritz Kreisler’s Violin Concerto in C Major (in the style of Vivaldi). Replacing Kuusisto as the soloist in the concerto will be CSO Assistant Concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu.

Added to the program is Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 in D Major, (The Clock), an oft-played work whose nickname was inspired by the “ticking” rhythm that runs through the Andante second movement.

Planning for the June 11-13 lineup started with famed French pianist and CSO regular, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the scheduled soloist. He provided a list of possible works he could perform, and Gaffigan quickly alighted on Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (The Age of Anxiety), a work for orchestra and piano that the famed American composer wrote in 1948-49.

“The Age of Anxiety, to my mind, is one of the top three pieces of Leonard Bernstein,” Gaffigan said. “There’s The Age of Anxiety, West Side Story and Serenade. These are for me, musically, the greatest pieces that he wrote.”

That the symphony is the least frequently performed of these three works only whetted the conductor’s appetite. “I think it’s a great opportunity to showcase the piece with a player like Jean-Yves, who feels jazzy music, as well as classical,“ Gaffigan said. ”That’s what Leonard Bernstein was as a composer. He didn’t say one was better or the other.”

Indeed, Gaffigan said, the “big statement” of this program is that no music is better than another. “There’s just good music, and I believe they should share the stage, whether it’s gospel or jazz or classical,” he said. “Good music is good music, and the future of music is about versatility.”

To that end, Gaffigan asked Cristina Rocca, the CSO’s vice president of artistic administration, if the program could include a local gospel choir. So she and her staff lined up the Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir from Chicago’s South Side. It will perform four spirituals, to be spread across each half of the program.

At the same time, Gaffigan wanted to include a work by George Gershwin, but not one of the predictable ones. Instead, he will lead the orchestra’s first-ever performances of the overture to the 1930 musical Girl Crazy.

“I didn’t want to do the typical program,” he said. “I didn’t want to do Rhapsody in Blue. I didn’t want to do Cuban Overture or American in Paris, because the point was to do a composer who everyone knew but something different.”

Rounding out the program is the CSO debut of Symphonic Nocturne, a suite fashioned by famed arranger Robert Russell Bennett from Kurt Weill’s 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and a book by Moss Hart. The 17-minute work was first performed in 1949 by the New York Philharmonic.

Weill spent much of his life in his native Germany, where he wrote such famed works as The Threepenny Opera, but as a Jew, the composer was forced to flee from the Nazis in 1933. He ultimately settled in the United States, becoming an American citizen and enjoying a kind of second career in his adopted country’s musical theater.

A fan of Lady in the Dark, Gaffigan didn’t know of the suite until he discovered it on a 2025 Naxos recording of Weill’s music that featured conductor Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. “He was so ahead of time,” he said of Weill, “but also celebrating his craft better than anyone. I’m happy to present this music that the general public won’t know, but they will go away whistling the tunes.”

When his appointment at the Houston Grand Opera becomes official in 2029, Gaffigan will replace noted conductor Patrick Summers, who was appointed HGO’s music director in 1998 and added the title of artistic director in 2011.

“I love the U.S. I know it has is problems, and today, it’s a bit of a crazy time,” Gaffigan said. “But I love the people [in the United States] I grew up with. I love the American orchestras. I thought it was a perfect opportunity, and it’s a rare opportunity, something like this.”

Gaffigan admits that at first, he was a little uncertain about the Houston company because he didn’t know much about it. “But the more I learned about it,” he said, “the more visits we had with one another, it just became clear to me that this institution is a perfect example of what an American institution could be and how healthy it could be. And the public is so behind it. It’s rare, so I wanted to be part of that.”

It helped that he was acquainted with Houston, having pursued his graduate studies at Rice University. He regards it as a great American city. “As a New Yorker, I fell in love with it, which I didn’t expect to do,” he said.

HGO is one of the cradles of contemporary American opera, with a history of presenting the world premieres of four works by Carlisle Floyd, not to mention John Adams’ Nixon in China in 1987 and Mark Adamo’s Little Women in 1998.

Gaffigan wants to build on that extraordinary legacy. “For me, it’s very important that an opera company does premiere works, especially supporting people from the U.S.,” he said. The maestro is also eager to be part of the company’s pre-professional training program, now known as the Butler Studio, what he called “the most exciting young-artist program in the country.”

The first production he will lead as HGO’s music director designate is Floyd’s best-known work, Susannah (1955), on Oct. 23-Nov. 8, 2026, an adaptation of the Biblical story of a woman who supported Jesus’ mission. Susannah has received more than 200 productions worldwide, including its 1999 debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with soprano Renée Fleming in the title role.

The conductor plans to move to Houston with his wife, Marta Wasilewicz-Gaffigan. “We want to have a home there,” he said. “It gives me an opportunity, like Berlin, to be in one place and do these things that a music director should do. It’s not just conducting operas — it’s auditioning, it’s getting to know the staff, it’s getting to know the board, it’s raising money, it’s raising awareness, and it’s educating. And for me, I need to live there to do that. You can’t live in and out of a hotel and fly back and forth to New York.”

Gaffigan began his post at the Komische Oper Berlin (one of three major opera companies in Germany’s capital city) in 2023-24, and he has agreed to extend his tenure there through 2029-30, which means there will be three seasons of overlap between his duties in Berlin and Houston. 

“I would love to say there longer, but I can’t do both for an extended period of time,” Gaffigan said. “I couldn’t say no to Komische because they are like family, and it was too soon to goodbye after four years.”

For much of his career, Gaffigan has maintained simultaneous conducting posts in the operatic and symphonic worlds, and he hopes to be able to do that again once his time in Berlin is over.

“I would say in a perfect world in ’29-’30,” he said, “I would have my eyes on something interesting symphonically. Whether it’s in Europe or the United States, it doesn’t matter, but to have a symphonic home would be really important to me.”

Meanwhile, in his limited free time, he will continue his guest conducting with major orchestras such as the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich, and of course, the CSO, where he has become something of a regular. 

“It’s been almost every year, which has been great,” Gaffigan said of his visits to the Windy City. “And what I love is that the programs have been so different. There’s been an American focus recently, but next year [a set of concerts March 18-20, 2027], there’s Schumann, Prokofiev and Mozart."