New Artist of the Month: Conductor Iván López Reynoso

There’s a particular magic to Santa Fe Opera’s open-air setting in summer. It was under that spell of sound and space that I first heard Iván López Reynoso last August. He led a Bohème that had an emotional pull alive with unexpected detail, as though the score had been gently polished from within.

“The base for me is always the score,” López Reynoso said in a recent Zoom interview from Madrid, speaking of how he approaches repertoire like Puccini. He had just stepped out of a rehearsal for a rare modern revival of an 1870 zarzuela by Emilio Arrieta—El potosí submarino, which he compares to Offenbach in style. “The great composers were extremely intelligent, and 90 percent of the time they knew exactly what they wanted. But that remaining 10 percent gives you possibilities, and that’s the space I want to explore.”

That appetite for exploration now meets an expanded platform in López Reynoso’s new role as principal conductor of Atlanta Opera, which began this season. His first full production in the post will return him to Puccini this spring with Turandot, featuring Angela Meade, Piero Pretti, Juliana Grigoryan, and Peixin Chen. For López Reynoso, this appointment is more than a milestone; it marks a new axis around which the Mexico City-based conductor’s expanding career will turn.

The Fantasia Child

The roots of his journey reach back to Guanajuato, a colonial-era city in central Mexico, a few hours northwest of the capital. López Reynoso was born there in 1990 into a household rich in ideas but not at all musical. Both parents were engineers connected to the local university; classical music simply wasn’t part of the family vocabulary. Then, when he was two, his grandmother gave him a home-video of the classic Disney film Fantasia.

“Once I saw the film, music never left my life,” he recalls. By three, he was already imitating Leopold Stokowski’s sweeping gestures, announcing to his bewildered parents that he wanted to conduct for a living.

Unsure what to do with a toddler who saw orchestral scores in dancing hippos and flying dinosaurs, they asked colleagues for advice. The consensus: Take him to concerts. So López Reynoso’s earliest live-music experiences were the military band that played Sunday mornings in the park, followed by the local symphony’s Friday night performances. “They were very supportive, even though they had no idea what to do.”

López Reynoso began violin and piano lessons young, then moved to the Conservatorio de Las Rosas in Morelia—“the logical next step,” he says, given its history as the oldest music conservatory in the Americas. There he added choral conducting and, almost by accident, the first seeds of a later surprise: singing.

At 17, he sang Monostatos in The Magic Flute—as a tenor. Only later, joking around with friends, did he discover an agile falsetto. A teacher urged him to explore it, and the countertenor repertoire soon became an unexpected but welcome part of López Reynoso’s musical life. Even now, he gives recitals when his schedule allows. Singing, he believes, keeps him physically connected to the craft: “It’s one thing to say how to do it. It’s another to do it yourself.” Then he adds, with a characteristic touch of modesty: “But I’m a conductor who sings, not a singer who conducts.”

By 18, López Reynoso had moved to Mexico City, drawn by the magnet of opera houses, symphony orchestras, festivals, and the country’s intense musical life. At the Palacio de Bellas Artes he cycled through roles—pianist, assistant conductor, chorus master—before making his opera debut at age 20 with The Marriage of Figaro.

His international debut followed in 2014 when the legendary Rossini scholar and conductor Alberto Zedda selected him to conduct Il viaggio a Reims in Pesaro, which became his initiation into Italy’s bel canto heartland. “Zedda was such a generous, brilliant man,” he says. “I admire conductors who are versatile and curious—who can conduct Bruckner but also late Verdi and Rossini. That profile inspires me.”

López Reynoso feels particularly close to Mozart and Rossini, whose operas have anchored different points in his development. “Now I’m always traveling between bel canto and Puccini,” he says. That foundation broadened further during two years as Kapellmeister in Braunschweig, when he confronted repertoire that had once felt distant: his first Wagner with The Flying Dutchman, French lyricism in Werther, and the sweep of Romantic and verismo operas such as Don Carlo and Tosca. Most recently, just before his current zarzuela project in Madrid, he conducted Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. “I’m trying to open a little more the range of styles that I conduct,” he says. “Naturally, you start feeling some composers are closer to you and to your personality.”

Vision in Atlanta

These widening horizons dovetail neatly with what awaits him in Atlanta. López Reynoso’s arrival comes at a moment when the company is defining its next chapter, and he speaks about the role with unmistakable excitement. “Atlanta will be my second home,” he tells me. The praise he received for his company debut with Macbeth last March was proof of his instant chemistry with the company. “From the first rehearsal, I felt a special connection with the orchestra, with the house. They’re willing to try new things.” He credits General Director Tomer Zvulun with fostering that atmosphere.

López Reynoso’s appointment is structured to let him maintain a global career while shaping the company’s musical direction: He is expected to conduct at least one major production each season through 2028. Within that framework, López Reynoso envisions building a distinctive sound.

“I want to work with the orchestra on sound quality and interpretation,” he explains. “Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi—these composers help a lot in perfecting the sounds you need to create with an operatic orchestra.” He admires conductors like Simon Rattle, Kirill Petrenko, and Paavo Järvi for the way they carry a distinct sound with them while allowing the music to flow freely—a reminder, he says, that the conductor is “just one dimension in the chain, not the end of it.” From that Italian repertorial foundation, he plans to move outward into Puccini, and German and contemporary work.

Despite a career that has him constantly in motion, López Reynoso stays closely connected to his musical roots in Mexico, cherishing especially close ties with both the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico's Philharmonic Orchestra] and the Xalapa Symphony. Orchestral work makes up roughly 30 percent of his conducting activity—the rest is opera—but those relationships remain essential anchors. Balancing them with an international schedule is no small feat: His calendar now stretches as far ahead as 2031, with important debuts at the Savonlinna Opera Festival and Naples’s Teatro di San Carlo in 2026. “The world moves fast,” he says; but he seems intent on keeping pace without losing sight of where he began.