SEATTLE SYMPHONY APPOINTS LEE MILLS AS DOUGLAS F. KING ASSOCIATE CONDUCTOR AND LINA GONZALEZ-GRANADOS AS CONDUCTING FELLOW

MILLS AND GONZALEZ-GRANADOS WILL BEGIN THEIR APPOINTMENTS IN THE 2019–2020 SEASON

SEATTLE, WA – The Seattle Symphony and Music Director Designate Thomas Dausgaard announce the appointments of Lee Mills as the Douglas F. King Associate Conductor and Lina Gonzalez-Granados as the Conducting Fellow, beginning September 2019.

A winner of the Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award in both 2014 and 2017, Lee Mills is currently the Resident Conductor of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra. As the Seattle Symphony’s new Associate Conductor, Mills will conduct a wide range of Seattle Symphony concerts throughout the 2019–2020 season, Holiday programs and Family and Community Concerts. In addition to his performances, Mills will serve as cover conductor for the Music Director and guest conductors for a majority of the 2019–2020 season.

Lina Gonzalez-Granados joins the Seattle Symphony as Conducting Fellow following appointments with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia Festival and Nashville Symphony. Gonzalez-Granados’ responsibilities will focus on the Seattle Symphony Education and Community Engagement concerts, conducting several education concerts in the 2019–2020 season. Gonzalez-Granados will also serve as cover conductor on four Delta Air Lines Masterworks Season and Baroque & Wine series concerts.

Strong advocates of the music of Latin American composers, Mills and Gonzalez-Granados will together lead a concert featuring contemporary Latin American voices on the Seattle Symphony’s [untitled] series in the 2019–2020 season. Details will be announced in late February.

LEE MILLS DOUGLAS F. KING ASSOCIATE CONDUCTOR

Resident Conductor of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra and winner of the Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award in both 2014 and 2017, Lee Mills is internationally recognized as a passionate, multifaceted and energetic conductor. He has led performances with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra that have been hailed as having a “sonority of unequalled liveliness and quality,” working alongside such artists as Simone Porter, Conrad Tao, Eliane Coelho and the Smetana Trio. His conducting engagements outside of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra include the National Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Starting as Assistant Conductor of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra in September 2014, he was promoted to Resident Conductor after only 18 months. In 2017 Mills was selected as a semifinalist in both the Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition and the Opera Royal de Wallonie-Liege International Opera Conducting Competition. In 2014, he conducted alongside David Robertson in the highly acclaimed U.S. Premiere of John Cage’s Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras with the Saint Louis Symphony. At the invitation of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Marin Alsop, he received the prestigious BSO-Peabody Institute Conducting Fellowship in 2011.

Under the tutelage of Gustav Meier and Marin Alsop, Mills received his Graduate Performance Diploma and Artist Diploma in Orchestral Conducting at the Peabody Institute. He has been a conducting fellow at the prestigious American Academy of Conducting at Aspen during the summers of 2012 and 2013, where he worked closely with Robert Spano, Hugh Wolff and Larry Rachleff. A native of Montana, Mills graduated cum laude from Whitman College, where he began his conducting studies with Robert Bode. Additionally, he has studied with Edward Polochick and Matthew Savery.

LINA GONZALEZ-GRANADOS CONDUCTING FELLOW

Praised for her "geniality" and ability to create "lightning changes in tempo, meter and effect" (Boston Musical Intelligencer), Lina Gonzalez-Granados has firmly established herself locally and abroad as a talented conductor of opera, classical and contemporary music. She is a staunch proponent of the music of Latin American composers, work which earned her recognition as one of the "Latino 30 Under 30" by El Mundo newspaper in 2016.

In 2014 Gonzalez-Granados founded Unitas Ensemble, a Boston-based chamber orchestra specializing in Latin American music. Her work with Unitas Ensemble has yielded multiple World, North American and American premieres, as well as the creation and release of the Unitas Ensemble album Estaciones, recorded alongside the Latin Grammy-winning Cuarteto Latinoamericano. The 2018–2019 season included guest conducting debuts with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia and will include engagements with Tulsa Opera and Santa Fe Pro Musica. 

In September 2017 Gonzalez-Granados was appointed the newest Taki Concordia Conducting Fellow, a position created by Marin Alsop to foster the entrepreneurship and talent of female conductors. Gonzalez-Granados has been the assistant conductor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival, Nashville Symphony and the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, working with artists such as Giancarlo Guerrero, Tobias Picker, Yefim Bronfman and Pinchas Zukerman, among others.

In 2018 Gonzalez-Granados attended the Lucerne Festival master class with Maestro Bernard Haitink as one of the eight conductors selected worldwide. Gonzalez-Granados has also attended the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music with Marin Alsop and James Ross. She participated in the Linda and Mitch Hart Institute for Conductors at the Dallas Opera, making her the first Hispanic conductor selected for that role. She has conducted in master classes with Nicole Paiment, Carlo Montanaro, Kenneth Kiesler, Andrés Orozco Estrada, Frank Battisti, Benjamin Juarez and Roselin Pabon.

Born and raised in Cali, Colombia, Gonzalez-Granados made her conducting debut in 2008 with the Youth Orchestra of Bellas Artes in Cali. She earned her master’s degree in Conducting and a Graduate Diploma in Choral Conducting from New England Conservatory, and is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in Orchestral Conducting at Boston University. Her principal mentors include Bramwell Tovey, Stefan Asbury, Erica Washburn and Charles Peltz. 

SEATTLE SYMPHONY

The Seattle Symphony is one of America’s leading symphony orchestras and is internationally acclaimed for its innovative programming and extensive recording history. Since September 2011 the Symphony has been led by Music Director Ludovic Morlot and in September 2019 Principal Guest Conductor Thomas Dausgaard will become the next Music Director. The Symphony is heard from September through July by more than 500,000 people through live performances and radio broadcasts and performs in one of the finest modern concert halls in the world — the acoustically superb Benaroya Hall — in downtown Seattle. Its extensive education and community engagement programs reach over 65,000 children and adults each year. The Seattle Symphony has a deep commitment to new music, commissioning many works by living composers each season. The orchestra has made nearly 150 recordings and has received three Grammy Awards, 26 Grammy nominations, two Emmy Awards and was named Gramophone’s 2018 Orchestra of the Year. In 2014 the Symphony launched its in-house recording label, Seattle Symphony Media.

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