After earning degrees in Composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Biology at Oberlin College, Swiss-American conductor Stefan Lano continued studies as a scholarship student at Harvard University from which he holds a PhD in Composition. Under the auspices of the German Academic Exchange Service – DAAD – he was awarded a Direktstipendium for the study of Composition and Conducting in Berlin in 1977.

His professional career began as pianist-coach at the opera in Graz, Austria. Shortly thereafter, followed an extensive engagement on the Music Staff of the Vienna State Opera during the 1980s during which time he also worked at the Teatro alla Scala in Milano, the Salzburg Festival and the Teatro Liceo in Barcelona.

As Lorin Maazel had engaged him at the Vienna State Opera, it was also at M° Maazel's invitation that he was appointed Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1988. During his years in Pittsburgh, he continued composing. His Sinfonie N° 1 was cited with a BMI Award in Composition, and the work which immediately followed, his Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra, was chosen by Antal Dorati as the First Prize in the National Society of Arts and Letters Composition Competition in Washington, DC.

As prospects for conducting opera were far greater in Europe, he returned to Germany in 1991, where he made his conducting debut in Aachen in a critically acclaimed production of Alban Berg's Lulu. In the ensuing seasons, engagements in Germany and then, internationally, accrued. Principal among these was his engagement in 1993 to conduct the first South American production of the three-act version of Lulu at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. A version praised by the Argentine press as one of the most significant in the history of the theater, Stefan Lano established a collaboration and affection for the Teatro Colón which continues to this day.

Over the years, he conducted many important productions in Buenos Aires and was cited by the Argentine Association of Music Critics as Best Foreign Conductor for his renditions of Korngold's Die tote Stadt and Richard Strauss' Salome in 1999. In 2000, he was appointed Music Director of the Teatro Argentino and, at the behest of the Orquésta Estable del Teatro Colón, he was appointed Music Director of the Teatro Colón in 2005. During this tenure, he conducted the ensembles of the Teatro Colón on their first international tour to Mexico City with Puccini's Turandot; a tour in Argentina with the Requiem of Giuseppe Verdi; and a highly acclaimed rendition of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony at the Teatro Colón and at the Catedral Metropolitana in Buenos Aires.

Conducting Stravinsky's The Rake's Progess, Stefan Lano made his debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1997, working closely with M° James Levine on this production as well as the acclaimed Met production of Arnold Schönberg's Moses und Aron. There followed invitations to the San Francisco Opera, again for Berg's Lulu and Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe.

Having by this time, become known for his committment to contemporary music, he was invited to conduct the concert performances of Alban Berg's Wozzeck with the Montréal Symphony. With an excellent cast coupled with the beautiful sound of this orchestra, both public and press were stunned by the resonance of these concerts such that the press cited Lano and the orchestra with an OPUS Award for Best Concert of the Season in 2002. He was immediately re-engaged for the following season for a concert comprised of Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. Again, despite the modernist nature of the program, a second OPUS Award was accorded in 2003.

Among his many operatic activities, those most important to Stefan Lano are the presentations of new works among which are world premieres of Mayako Kubo's Rashomon at the Graz Opera, Mark Adamo's Lysistrata at the Houston Grand Opera, and Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner in co-production with the theaters of Detroit, Cincinnati and Philadelphia. In 2003, he conducted Alberto Ginastera's Bomarzo in a production with Regisseure, Alfredo Arias at the Teatro Colón. Important among such projects were also the operas of Wolfgang Rihm – Jakob Lenz in Bonn and Die Eroberung von Mexiko in Nürnberg, as well as his concerts in Spain with the young orchestra of the Escuela Superior de la Musica Reína Sofía in Madrid – an institution which shares his commitment to music of the twentieth century. Most recently, he lead the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in a program of new works by American composers.

Concurrent to his conducting engagements, Lano completed his Sinfonie N° 3 of which he conducted the world premiere in 2004 with the Lithuanian National Philharmonic. He is currently composing his Piano Concerto N° 2 which will receive its world-premiere with this orchestra and Lithuanian pianist Muza Rubackyte in 2011.

Since 2008, he has been a regular guest at the Slovak National Theater in Bratislava, the Macedonian National Philharmonic and the Zagreb Philharmonic with which he has recently performed the Symphonies N° 6 and 12 of Dimitri Shostakovich and Richard Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie.

A most significant recent engagement was at the Sächsische Staatsoper in Dresden conducting Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking in 2007 after he was immediately re-invited to conduct the 2009 production of Hans Werner Henze's L'Upupa. His work with the Semper Oper ensemble and Staatskapelle Dresden was universally praised in the German and international press as a major artistic triumph for the theater, orchestra, and the notion that contemporary music can be presented with such lucidity, color and commitment.

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