Conductor Vincent La Selva has been a New York music institution for fifty years. Founder of the New York Grand Opera Company in 1973, he is unique in the world for presenting fully-staged grand opera productions that are free to the public. 

Since 1974, Mr. La Selva has chosen New York’s Central Park for his productions of grand opera, conducting over 55 operas in upwards of 350 performances, which over the years, have been attended by more than three million people. In 2001 Mr. La Selva finished an unprecedented eight-year cycle of the complete Verdi operas -- all twenty-eight of them -- performed in chronological order.

In March 2004 Maestro La Selva launched “Honoring Verdi”  --  a decade-long annual series of Verdi operas and related operatic and orchestral programs leading to 2013, the 200^th anniversary of Verdi’s birth  --   with a special performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall. This was followed in November 2005 by a concert performance of Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco also at Carnegie Hall.  In 2006, Maestro La Selva led the New York Grand Opera in a concert performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew in New York City and performed Verdi’s Otello there in March.   Maestro La Selva continued his legendary presentations of fully-staged opera in Central Park this summer with Puccini's Suor Angelica coupled with Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci.

In addition to his opera performances, Maestro La Selva has earned special renown for conducting symphonic scores with directness, lyricism, and great passion.  The noted critic B.H. Haggin praised La Selva in the following manner:  “It is clear that he has 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 not only in orchestra but singers.”  He has led acclaimed performances with the New Jersey Symphony, the Juilliard Symphony, the Brno State Philharmonic in the Czech Republic, the Bern Symphony in Switzerland, the Symphony of the Air (formerly the NBC Symphony,) and he was Music Director of the Greater Trenton Symphony Orchestra.  He numbers among his collaborators such soloists as Leonard Rose, Ruggiero Ricci, Zinka Milanov, Rudolf Firkusny, Murray Perahia, Renata Tebaldi, Franco Corelli, and Peter Serkin.  Since 1969 Mr. La Selva has been a member of the Juilliard School faculty, teaching courses in symphonic conducting, and opera.   In 1995 the President of Italy knighted Mr. La Selva as a “Cavaliere” in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his distinguished service to Italian music. Mr. La Selva’s contribution to the cultural life of New York was commended by President Bill Clinton, New York Governor George E. Pataki, and former New York Mayor 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.