Christopher Rountree
About this Artist
Three-time Grammy-nominated conductor and composer Christopher Rountree is the music director of Long Beach Opera, co-founder of the Los Angeles Conducting Co-op, and perhaps best known as founder, conductor, and Artistic Director of the pathbreaking orchestral collective Wild Up. The group’s eccentric mix of new music, pop, and performance art quickly jumped from raucous DIY bar shows to being lauded as the vanguard of classical music by critics for the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, public radio’s Performance Today, and The New York Times. Wild Up started in 2010 with no funding and no musicians, driven only by Rountree’s vision of a world-class orchestra that creates visceral, provocative experiences that are unmoored from classical traditions.
In 2019 he curated and conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Fluxus Festival, the experimental music component of the LA Phil’s 100th season in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute. The 16-concert Fluxus Festival united icons of contemporary art with classical music for the first time, placing Yoko Ono next to Ryoji Ikeda and Luciano Berio; La Monte Young next to Steven Takasugi next to John Cage. Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss, an ecstatic 12-hour rendering of Mozart, stood next to Alison Knowles’ Make a Salad, performed by 1,700 people. David Lang’s crowd out took over downtown LA, as orchestra musicians launched watermelons called for in Ken Friedman’s Sonata for Melons and Gravity off the top of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
As he’s become regarded as one of the most exciting and iconoclastic conductors and programmers in the field, Rountree’s inimitable style has led to collaborations with Björk, John Adams, Yoko Ono, David Lang, Scott Walker, La Monte Young, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Mica Levi, Alison Knowles, Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, Tyshawn Sorey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ash Fure, Julia Holter, Claire Chase, Missy Mazzoli, Ryoji Ikeda, Du Yun, Thaddeus Strassberger, Ellen Reid, Ted Hearne, James Darrah, and many of the planet’s greatest orchestras and ensembles, including the National, San Francisco, Houston, Cincinnati, Colorado, San Diego, and Chicago symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, Opéra national de Paris, the Washington National, Los Angeles, Omaha, San Diego, and Atlanta operas, and the Martha Graham Dance Company. He has presented compositions and concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Palais Garnier, Mile High Stadium, the Coliseum, the Echoplex, Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ace Hotel, National Sawdust, MCA Denver, the Hammer Museum, the Getty, a basketball court in Santa Cruz, and at Lincoln Center for the New York Philharmonic’s Biennale.