Benjamin Shwartz (born 1979) is an American-Israeli orchestral and opera conductor, and music director of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie, Koblenz (Germany).
[4] Born in Los Angeles and raised there and in Israel, he attended the Idyllwild Arts Academy in California before enrolling in the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied composition with James Primosch.
As a conducting student at the Curtis Institute of Music, he studied with Otto-Werner Mueller and worked closely with Christoph Eschenbach and Ned Rorem.
Committed to new music, Shwartz has premiered works by composers of his generation including Mason Bates, Nathaniel Stookey, Zhou Tian, and fielded American premieres including Three Asteroids by Mark-Anthony Turnage, (San Francisco Symphony, June 5, 2008), Vaporized Tivoli by Anders Hillborg (Los Angeles Philharmonic, April, 2011), as well as Israeli composer Tzvi Avni’s Piano Concerto.
In 2008, along with Bates and set designer Anne Paterson, Shwartz created Mercury Soul, juxtaposing the music of composers such as Xenakis, Dennehy, Webern, Ligeti, Adès, and Bates with electronica and electro-acoustic interludes of DJ’d and classical music, performed in a night-club atmosphere in Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami.