Awards

Bicentennial Medal - 2019

About Arthur Fagen

Arthur Fagen is a professor of orchestral conducting at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music since 2008. He has also been music director of the Atlanta Opera since 2010. Fagen conducted a new production of Turandot at the Atlanta Opera in 2007, opening the season and inaugurating the new opera house, the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center. From 2002 to 2007, he was music director of the Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra and the Dortmund Opera. He and the Dortmund Philharmonic were invited to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels, and to Salzburg, Beijing, and Shanghai. From 1998-2001, he was invited regularly as guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera.

Fagen has conducted opera productions at the world's most prestigious opera houses and music festivals, and has an opera repertory of more than 75 works. On the concert podium, he has appeared with numerous internationally known orchestras. He has served as principal conductor in Kassel and Brunswick, as chief conductor of the Flanders Opera of Antwerp and Ghent, as music director of the Queens Symphony Orchestra, and as a member of the conducting staff of the Chicago Lyric Opera.

Fagen has received many honors and awards; he was first-prize winner of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conductors Competition, and a prize winner of the Gino Marinuzzi International Conductors' Competition in Italy. Fagen has recorded for BMG, Bayerischer Rundfunk, SFB, and WDR Cologne. He records regularly for Naxos, for which he has completed the six symphonies of Bohuslav Martinu. His Naxos recording of Martinu's piano concertos was awarded an Editor's Choice award in the March 2010 issue of Gramophone magazine. In 2019, Fagan was honored with Indiana University's Bicentennial Medal, in recognition of his distinguished service to the university.