"La Selva conducts Italian Opera with the kind of passionate thrust and grand line that has become a lost art." NEW YORK MAGAZINE

"one of the best conductors around, who can drive an opera home with a directness and impact frequently lacking in the routine of prestigious houses." THE NEW YORK TIMES

Vincent La Selva, conductor, has been a New York institution for almost 50 years. Founder of the New York Grand Opera Company in 1973, he is unique in the world for presenting fully staged opera productions that are free to the public. Since 1974, Maestro La Selva has chosen New York’s Central Park for his productions of grand opera, which have been attended by more than three million people. Maestro La Selva has earned special renown for leading performances that cut to the musical essence of these scores with a directness, lyricism and passion that has often invoked the conducting style of the late Arturo Toscanini. The New York Grand Opera Company, led by Mr. La Selva, is synonymous with grand opera, idiomatically performed—and accessible to all.

Maestro La Selva’s contribution to the cultural life of New York has been commended by President Bill Clinton, New York Governor George E. Pataki, New York Mayors Edward Koch, David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani, an avid opera lover, who awarded La Selva the coveted Handel Medallion, New York City’s highest distinction for achievement in culture and the arts. Maestro La Selva won the "Conductor of the Year” Award for his performances at the New York Empire State Festival and was knighted by the President of Italy as a "Cavaliere" in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his distinguished service to Italian music. In April 2008, The Women’s City Club of New York honored Maestro La Selva with its Civic Spirit Award for his many contributions to the cultural life of New York.

In 2001, Maestro La Selva completed "Viva Verdi!," devoted to the performance in chronological order of all twenty-eight operas of Giuseppe Verdi. Begun in 1994 with a performance of the little-known Oberto, at Central Park's Summerstage Pavillion, this grand but daunting project was completed eight years later with acclaimed renditions of three of Verdi's greatest operas, Aida, Otello and Falstaff. It is estimated that at least 300,000 people attended the performances over the entire eight-year period. As Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times:

Taken in context, these productions have been a great gift to the city and an important artistic venture. . . Mr. La Selva is an insightful Verdian , with a sure grasp of style and a special sympathy for the music. Whenever the music threatened to break down, there was Mr. La Selva , confident in his sure knowledge of every page of every score, rallying his forces and holding it all together.

(August 4, 2001)

As a result, New York Grand Opera is celebrated in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first opera company ever to stage the complete 28-opera Verdi cycle in the order in which the operas were written.

The concept of providing free concerts for New Yorkers has its origin early in Mr. La Selva's career when he founded, in 1954, the all-volunteer Xavier Symphony Society, which offered free symphonic concerts, then opera at the magnificent auditorium of St. Francis Xavier High school on West 16th Street. It was here that a notable low-cost revival of his opera production of Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street  came to the favorable attention of the composer, who was so impressed with what La Selva could do with limited resources that he arranged to have La Selva lead a revival production of the The Saint  at New York's City Opera. This led to Mr. La Selva's appointment to New York City Opera where he would also conduct productions of Tosca, Nabucco,  Mefistofele, Cavalleria Rusticana, Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, La Bohème, I Pagliacci, and Menotti's The Consul. After his appointment to City Opera, La Selva directed a series of Italian operas and was hailed for his passion, respect for the composer's intentions, and clarity of baton technique.

La Selva has been compared favorably to Arturo Toscanini by no less an authority than critic B.H. Haggin, who credited La Selva with "what Bernard Shaw has called the highest faculty of a conductor, the magnetic influence under which an orchestra becomes as amenable to the baton as a pianoforte to the fingers." And the Verdi scholar George Martin in the British journal Opera wrote that "La Selva is probably the best conductor of Verdi, and perhaps of Puccini, currently at work in New York." In addition, Maestro La Selva has conducted performances of La Bohème at the Opera Company of Boston with Renata Tebaldi and Placido Domingo, and many other important regional companies with casts including Franco Corelli, Mirella Freni, Sherrill Milnes, and Samuel Ramey.

Maestro La Selva is an accomplished conductor of symphonic music, whose love of Beethoven's symphonic scores predates his involvement with opera. In 1966, he was appointed Music Director of the Greater Trenton Symphony, and he has also conducted concerts with the New Jersey Symphony, the Symphony of the Air, the Juilliard Symphony, the Brno State Philharmonic in the Czech Republic, and the Bern Symphony of Switzerland. He numbers among his collaborators such soloists as Leonard Rose, Ruggiero Ricci, Mirella Freni, Licia Albanese, Renata Tebaldi, Zinka Milanov, Rudolf Firkusny, Murray Perahia, and Peter Serkin. Since 1969 Mr. La Selva has been a member of the Juilliard School faculty, teaching courses in symphonic and operatic conducting, and opera appreciation.

Newport Classics released a highly praised recording of Maestro La Selva conducting Verdi's complete overtures with the Bern Symphony Orchestra, including the overture composed for the La Scala premiere of Aida which was never performed in the opera house. In naming this disk "Hot Pick of the Week," New York's classical music station WQXR stated that "La Selva clearly owns this repertoire" and has referred to him as "the greatest conductor of Verdi in the world today."

A native of Cleveland, Maestro La Selva began his musical career at the age of eight, when he began learning the trumpet. By the age of 12, he was already conducting student ensembles. Later, the young La Selva attended the Juilliard School, where he studied conducting under Jean Morel. After graduation from Juilliard, he entered military service and was a conductor of the First Army band at Fort Jay on Governor's Island.

Mr. La Selva has been a faculty member of The Juilliard School Evening Division since 1969. He teaches courses on Italian opera and often showcases young and promising singers. La Selva divides his time between his studio in New York and his home in Montclair, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife Danny.

             Since New York Grand Opera premiered with a performance of La Boheme on May 23, 1973 in the grand ballroom of the Riverside Plaza Hotel on Manhattan’s West 73^rd Street, the Company has given over 200 performances of over 50 different operas  to over 3 million people in Central Park, throughout the five boroughs, Long Island and New Jersey.  For  many, New York Grand Opera’s performances have been their first experience hearing and seeing an opera.  

New York Grand Opera’s performances  have included not only the standards such as Aida, Rigoletto, Tosca, Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci but also such rarities as an unfamiliar La Boheme by Leoncavallo and Verdi’s lost and rare Stiffelio in their American premieres; the first staged performances in the United States of Verdi’s Giovanna d'Arco; the first staged performance in New York of Aroldo; the first  New York staged performance in 127 years of Verdi’s I Masnadieri; the first New York performance with orchestra of the earliest Verdi opera, Oberto; and the first professional staged performance in fifty years of Halevy’s La Juive.

             In addition to its annual summer series in Central Park, New York Grand Opera has played throughout the metropolitan area in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Beacon Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Temple B’nai Jeshurun, Bronx Botanical Gardens, Cunningham Park in Queens, Snug Harbor on Staten Island, Co-op City in the Bronx, the Flushing Center for the Arts, and Brookdale Park in Montclair, New Jersey. The company has also given a number of performances  for students in elementary through high schools throughout the City as part of its educational program.

            What makes the company truly unique is that while other companies present free opera performances during the summer, only the New York Grand Opera presents professional  fully-staged operas. Stage directors have included Anthony Stivaniello, Lawrence Florio,  Roberto Stivaniello, James Lucas (who has staged productions for New York’s Metropolitan Opera), Franco Gentilesca and  Albert Bergeret.

            When this company was formed, La Selva felt that New York needed a professional opera company which would fall somewhere between the New York City Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. La Selva wanted to build audiences, to give people a chance to see and hear opera who might not have been able to afford the other companies. And, of course, he wanted to give qualified singers a chance. Thus, he has discovered many singers who have gone on to professional careers as well as using Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera singers including Lucine Amara, Gabriella Tucci, Enrico di Giuseppe, Frank Guarrera and Isola Jones.