Domingo Hindoyan to become music director of LA Opera for 2026-27 season

Domingo Hindoyan will succeed James Conlon as music director of the LA Opera and start a five-year contract on July 1, 2026

NEW YORK -- Domingo Hindoyan will succeed James Conlon as music director of the LA Opera and start a five-year contract on July 1, 2026.

The appointment of the 45-year-old Venezuelan-Armenian, the husband of soprano Sonya Yoncheva, was announced Friday night. Conlon has been music director since 2006-07 and said in March 2024 that he will retire after after the 2025-26 season.

“LA is a city that is known by innovation, taking risks in productions and musically,” Hindoyan said in New York, where his wife is currently singing at the Metropolitan Opera. “The idea is to do new pieces, commissions and modern pieces, something to really have a balance between what is classic and go further as much as we can.”

Hindoyan will conduct two productions in 2026-27 and three in each of the following four seasons, LA Opera President Christopher Koelsch said. Koelsch hopes Hindoyan can lead works with Yoncheva, who has not sung a staged production at the LA Opera.

Like other companies, the LA Opera has struggled with increased costs following the pandemic and scrapped a planned pair of world premieres over finances. Tenor and conductor Plácido Domingo was a key figure in fundraising for the company as general director from 2003-19.

“Part of my job as a music director and the job of any musician is to really take care of the art form as much as we can," Hindoyan said, "not only on stage, not only studying at home (but also) the connection with the community and the connection to the donors.”

Hindoyan was born in Caracas, played violin and is a product of El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education system that was instrumental in the careers of Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare. He was an assistant to Daniel Barenboim at Berlin’s Staatsoper unter den Linden.

“Given Barenboim's extremely exacting standards, I was impressed that he had that job and held onto that job," Koelsch said. “And then I saw a performance of 'Tosca' and was kind of immediately struck by the elegance of the baton technique and just the sort of the absolute clarity of what he was conveying.”

Hindoyan has been chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic since the 2021-22 season. He first conducted the LA Opera last November in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.”

“There’s a kind of a natural warmth and charisma to him. In my experience, he almost always coaxes the best out of people," Koelsch said. “The 'Roméo' run for me was kind of a test run of how those qualities resonated inside our building, how it worked with the orchestra and the chorus and the administration and the audiences.”