Conductor Piotr Gajewski, a student and disciple of the late Leonard Bernstein, continues to thrill audiences with inspiring performances of great music. His large and varied repertoire, most of it conducted without a score, amazes critics and audiences alike. In The Washington Post he has been hailed as an “immensely talented and insightful conductor, whose standards, taste and sensitivity are impeccable.” A critic from The Buffalo News observed, “His courtly, conservative movements matched the music’s mood. A flick of the finger, and a fanfare sounded. He held up his palm, and the musicians quieted. It was like watching a race car in the hands of a good driver.”
Gajewski is music director and conductor of the National Philharmonic at The Music Center at Strathmore (metropolitan Washington, DC). He is also in demand as a guest conductor, having appeared with the Buffalo Philharmonic, the South Florida Symphony, and the Annapolis Symphony in the United States; and England’s Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Symphony, and most of the major orchestras in his native Poland, including the Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław philharmonics.
From 2013 to 2017 Piotr Gajewski served as principal guest conductor of the Silesian Philharmonic in Katowice; in 2017, he lead an 11-city tour of Germany with the ensemble. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gajewski continued to appear frequently with that orchestra, as well as with the Białystok Philharmonic and Warsaw’s Sinfonia Iuventus. He also regularly collaborates with contemporary composers, and has conducted numerous important world premieres - most recently, the setting of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by Henry Dehlinger (2021) and A Knee on The Neck by Adolphus Hailstork, with text by Herbert Martin (2022).
Committed to the development of young talent, Gajewski has served on the
faculties of The American University, The George Washington University, and The Catholic University of America’s Benjamin T. Rome School of Music. Since 2007, he has served three times on the jury of Poland’s Grzegorz Fitelberg International Competition for Young Conductors.
At the National Philharmonic, Gajewski launched the groundbreaking “All Kids, All Free, All the Time” initiative, and created summer institutes for young string players and singers as well as masterclasses with esteemed visiting artists. Working with the local school system, Gajewski established the National Philharmonic’s program of annual orchestra concerts for all second-grade students in Maryland’s Montgomery County—more than 13,000 each year.
Gajewski began studying piano at age four. After immigrating to the United
States, he continued his studies in the Preparatory Division of Boston’s New
England Conservatory, at Carleton College in Minnesota, and at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in orchestral conducting. His conducting mentors, in addition to Bernstein—with whom he studied at Tanglewood Music Center on a Leonard Bernstein Conducting Fellowship—include such luminaries as Seiji Ozawa, André Previn, Gunther Schuller, and Maurice Abravanel.
Maestro Gajewski’s many honors include the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit (bestowed on him by the former president of Poland) and a prize at New York’s Leopold Stokowski Conducting Competition.
A true Renaissance man, Gajewski continues to play competitive soccer, holds a law degree and a license to practice law in two states, and from 2007 to 2011 served on the City Council in his hometown of Rockville, Maryland.
Piotr Gajewski is represented worldwide by Sciolino Artist Management.
September 2022
Do not make any alterations to this biography. Concert presenters and other interested parties may obtain an updated and/or abridged version by contacting Katie Masterson, katie@samnyc.us.