Profile

Ryan Murray is currently the Artistic Director and Conductor of Music in the Mountains and the Associate Conductor of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra. He is also the Director of Symphony Orchestra & Opera at California State University, Sacramento, and the Conductor for the Sacramento Youth Symphony's Premier Orchestra. An award-winning opera conductor, Ryan spent his early career working as an assistant conductor and répétiteur, and is currently the Music Director of Opera Modesto. He has served as assistant conductor for opera productions at the Sacramento Philharmonic and is the past Music Director of Fresno Grand Opera, and previously worked as a staff conductor for the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI) and The Opera Academy of California in San Francisco. Effortlessly moving between genres, Ryan currently enjoys a wide range of performance genres & platforms, including traditional orchestral and operatic repertoire, pops performances, movies in concert, and a notable emphasis on contemporary American operatic works.

As the Associate Conductor of the Modesto Symphony, Ryan has overseen a nearly five-fold increase in audience attendance for the Modesto Symphony's education concerts since 2014.  As the Music Director of the Modesto Symphony Youth Orchestra, Ryan has consistently worked to improve the quality, skill and prominence of the youth orchestra; with a passion for education and a remarkable flair for program building, he now leads an ensemble that features over 120 students from the greater Modesto area.

Ryan has recently garnered national recognition for his dynamic, compelling performances of contemporary opera and was the winner of the 2017 American Prize in Opera Conducting for his highly lauded production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He was a 2016 semi-finalist for the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music for his production of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking. Ryan is also a past winner of the Vienna Philharmonic’s prestigious Ansbacher Fellowship for Young Conductors, and spent the summer in residence alongside the Vienna Philharmonic at the 2014 Salzburg Festival.

Ryan holds degrees, summa cum laude, in Bassoon Performance and Voice Performance from California State University, Sacramento and also holds a master’s degree in Music Business from the Berklee College of Music.