Yaniv Segal
Creative polymath Yaniv Segal is a rising star who is “redefining classical music” (Esquire Magazine), and who has achieved success since childhood as a versatile performer and artist. Yaniv is currently Music Director of the Salina Symphony, Conductor Laureate and Artistic Advisor of the Chelsea Symphony, and former Assistant Conductor of the Naples Philharmonic and Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He has assisted at the New York Philharmonic and collaborated with performers ranging from Yitzhak Perlman to the Beach Boys. Yaniv has appeared as a conductor with the Minnesota Orchestra, Kansai Philharmonic, Sinfonietta Cracovia, and Beethoven Academy Orchestra, among others. Since 2023, Yaniv is also Musical Artistic Director and co-creator of American Patriots, a new theatrical song cycle examining Patriotism and the American experience from Indigenous, Black, white working class, and new American perspectives.
In 2020, NAXOS released Yaniv’s Beethoven REimagined, a commercial recording called “exciting [and] outrageous” by the Times of London. The album presents contemporary music inspired by Beethoven arranged and written by Yaniv as well as composer/DJ Gabriel Prokofiev. Previous commercial releases include the works of David Chesky on Joy and Sorrow, and The Mice War–an opera that teaches the children about the folly of war.
As a composer, Yaniv’s music has been recently performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Naples Philharmonic, Reno Philharmonic, Sarasota Chamber Orchestra, Ashland Symphony Orchestra, Salina Symphony, Grand Rapids Classical Orchestra, and Norwalk Symphony. He wrote The Harmony Games (2018) to introduce school-age children to the orchestra and connect music and math; it has already been performed over fifty times. Other major works include Symphony in Scenes: Skychange (2022), a new orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (2021), Cello Concerto (2015), and Rite of Spring (Redux) (2013) – a reworking and update of Stravinsky’s Rite that includes electric guitar, bass guitar, and saxophone.
As a child, Yaniv sang at the Metropolitan Opera, toured the USA and Japan with the First National Tour of The Secret Garden, acted in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood at Lincoln Center (where he “convinces as Hapgood’s adolescent son”- NY Times), and was a violin soloist twice with his hometown Yonkers Philharmonic. In the nineties he could be widely heard singing on TV commercials for Pepsi as well as on CDs ranging from classical opera to rock and folk music.
Yaniv was invited to the inaugural Castleton Festival by Lorin Maazel, and has studied with Kurt Masur at seminars in the USA and Europe. He was selected as one of 18 participants (out of over 350 applicants) in the 2018 Evgeny Svetlanov Competition in Paris and is mentored by Andrey Boreyko and Leonard Slatkin. In 2013, Yaniv completed graduate degrees in conducting and composition at the University of Michigan with renowned conducting pedagogue Kenneth Kiesler and MacArthur Award winning composer Bright Sheng, and with support from the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Yaniv is a first-generation American who grew up in New York City with a Polish mother –a violinist who was one of the first women in the New York Philharmonic– and an Israeli father –a luthier who made the instruments his family plays on.