Jotaro Nakano, Music Director

Japanese American conductor Jotaro Nakano is the music director of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of Boston’s medical and healthcare communities, and the orchestra director of the SA’Oaxaca Strings International Music Festival in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Since his inaugural season in 2023, Nakano has extended the Longwood Symphony’s mission of healing through music beyond the concert hall and into Boston’s leading hospitals, from Boston Children’s Hospital to hospice care with Care Dimensions. Under Nakano, the orchestra’s Healing Art of MusicTM program, which has raised millions of dollars for medical nonprofits since 1991, has grown to reach Tanglewood, with a performance and medical symposium on social prescribing at Ozawa Hall in 2024. In December 2025, Nakano invited cellist Joshua Roman to collaborate in a week-long Boston residency that built upon Roman’s “Immunity” project and closed with a concerto performance with the Longwood Symphony. During the residency, they produced the orchestra’s first Well-Being Concert at Harvard Medical School, in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

In his first three seasons with the orchestra, Nakano has conducted four premieres: a Longwood Symphony commission by Heather Hyoeun Ahn, a world premiere by Zachary Fick-Cambria, and U.S. premieres by Nigel Westlake and Diana Syrse. His 2026-27 season will include the U.S. premiere of Gustavo Larrea’s Fayuca, a co-commission premiere by Veronica Leahy with Cambridge Common Voices, and a return to Tanglewood for a
symposium and performance featuring hornist Felix Klieser. 

SA’Oaxaca Strings International Music Festival is the first tuition-free chamber string music festival in Oaxaca, Mexico. Nakano has served as the festival orchestra director since its founding in 2019, and has taught and performed alongside more than 200 string students from Mexico and across Latin America. In 2025, Nakano launched the festival’s first Call-for-Scores program, inviting submissions from Mexican composers of the next generation. The program produced two world premieres at the 2026 festival by composers Charles Philip Daniels Torres and Carlos Eduardo González Pérez, and will continue to premiere new works by Mexican composers every summer.

As a child of Japanese immigrants, a drummer father and a dancer-pianist mother, Nakano was constantly surrounded by jazz and classical, traditional and pop, Japanese and American music. Since then, his music making has continued to traverse cultures and styles with an openness to music in all settings. While completing his doctorate at the Peabody Conservatory, Nakano served as the Arts in Health Fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, he supervised conservatory students in the “Music for a While” program, which ranged from hospital lobby performances to virtual bedside concerts. He piloted “Live@Lunchtime,” a multi-genre pop-up concert series that included a string orchestra he organized, brought into the hospital, and conducted. During the pandemic, he produced and conducted “Music for H.O.P.E.,” a video orchestra concert dedicated to Johns Hopkins medical workers, recorded in the hospital’s historic Hurd Hall. Nakano has since served as a panelist at the 2022 National Organization for Arts in Health Conference and as a speaker at the 2026 League of American Orchestras National Conference session, “Orchestras in Health and Well-Being, From Intention to Practice.”

In 2025, Nakano completed his doctorate at the Peabody Conservatory under the mentorship of Maestra Marin Alsop. He previously served as music director of the Ann Arbor Camerata, cover conductor for the Baltimore Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and San Diego Symphony, and conducting fellow of the Long Beach Symphony. He lives in Boston with his wife and their rabbit.