Brian McCann (he/him/his)
Pianist

Brian McCann is a versatile young conductor and pianist. 

With CCM opera he has conducted Händel’s Agrippina, scenes from Ariadne auf Naxos, and most notably the Main Stage production of Le Nozze di Figaro in 2021, directed by Robin Guarino. The Cincinnati Business Courier wrote, “McCann…led with musicality and a sure hand…Throughout the opera’s three-hour duration, momentum never flagged, yet McCann also allowed Mozart’s music to breathe. The orchestra performed exceedingly well for him,” (Gelfand 2021). 

In 2023, he will work with Cincinnati Opera, serving as an assistant conductor and pianist on workshops of the operas Robeson by Scott Davenport Richards and The Righteous by Gregory Spears, commissioned by the Sante Fe Opera. 

Brian has been an assistant conductor to the CCM Philharmonia since 2020, where he has led rehearsals and midday performances of works including Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, Petrushka (1911 version), and Brahms 3. 

He was accepted to the Domaine Forget de Charlevoix Conducting Masterclass in the summer of 2022 to study with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Thomas Rösner, and conducted the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec. 

With Rutgers Opera, Brian served on music staff for Le Nozze di Figaro, Der Mond, Gianni Schicchi and Il Tabarro, Albert Herring, and Les Contes d’Hoffmann. He conducted scenes from Robert Adridge’s Sister Carrie, with the composer in the audience. 

Brian was a piano student of Mr. John Perry and holds a degree in Piano Performance from Rutgers University. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Arthur G. Humphrey Memorial Prize for Excellence in Keyboard Music. 

He earned a Masters in Orchestral Conducting at CCM, where he studied with Maestro Mark Gibson, and served as a graduate assistant to the Opera Department as a pianist.