The 1976 premier of his Sinfonie N° 1 afforded him his initial experience in the symphonic genre, both as composer and conductor at the Newport Music Festival. ;Education Stefan attended Worcester Academy and graduated in 1970. He studied Biology and Composition concurrently at Oberlin College and Oberlin Conservatory of Music before attending Harvard University on a full fellowship. He holds a PhD in Composition from Harvard. ;Awards Among his awards as a composer are a BMI Award, First Prize in the National Society of Arts and Letters Composition Competition, an American Music Center Grant and a Fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service for further study of composition with Isang Yun in Berlin in 1977. ;Continued Studies During his time in Berlin, he continued piano studies as well as conducting under Professor Hans Martin Rabenstein. It was during this period that he composed his Sinfonie N° 2 before assuming a position as pianist at the opera house in Graz, Austria.
Career in the Symphony
In 1982, he was engaged toLorin Maazel as Repetiteur at the Vienna State Opera, a position which he held until his appointment by Maazel as Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1988 to 1991. He returned to Europe as I. Kapellmeister at the Aachen Opera where he subsequently also served as Music Director and Studienleiter. His international engagements began during these years with concert and opera performance at major musical centers in Europe, South America and Japan. For the first South American performances of the three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu, he was engaged to inaugurate the 1993 season at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since that time, he has been a regular guest at the Teatro Colón and served as its Music Director from 2005 to 2008. ;Conducting Debut He made his conducting debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1997 conducting Igor Stravinsky's The Rakes Progress. This led to engagements at the San Francisco Opera, again for Lulu in 1998 and Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe in 2000. In 2002, he conducted a concert-performance with the Montréal Symphony of Alban Berg's Wozzeck which was cited as Best Concert of the Season by the Conseil Québécoise de la Musique. In 2003, he and the orchestra again received this award for their performance of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. In recent years, his career has been centered primarily in Europe and South America with regular engagements at the Semper Oper Dresden, Hamburg State Opera, Lithuanian National Philharmonic, where he conducted the first performance of his Sinfonie N° 3 in 2004, and the National Opera of Slovakia in Bratislava and Teatro Colón.
