As one of the orchestra’s two assistant conductors, she has enjoyed already a rapid rise through the Juilliard School and a fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
LENOX — For BSO Assistant Conductor Anna Handler, her Tanglewood debut this Saturday night is a first chance to lead the orchestra and eventually to set the stage for whatever the next rung on her career ladder might be.
It’s a highly anticipated event for her, she said. “I’m not afraid, but of course I want to give them a reason to keep believing in me," she told The Eagle last week. "I don’t want disappoint them, I hope they will enjoy playing this program that goes from darkness to light, and that they will open their hearts and fly together.”
The program opens with Brahms’ “Tragic Overture,” followed by Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich.
What’s the role of the two assistant BSO conductors?
In rotation with Handler's colleague Samy Rashid, it's to be available and prepared to take over a concert if the scheduled conductor has to step aside because of an accident or sudden illness.
Handler, 29, already has made her mark on stages at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2022, and more recently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others.
She was named recently as the No. 2 conductor at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, leading 11 opera performances in the 2025-26 season at Germany’s second-largest opera house.
During a recent conversation on the Tanglewood campus, Handler, also an accomplished pianist, was asked how she chose conducting as her musical “instrument.”
“I think it found me, quite honestly,” she said.
The daughter of a German father and a Colombian mother — both were engineers — she attended a high school in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, after winning singing competitions with her sister, Laura, when they were 8 and 10.
Gestures and facial expressions typical of conducting came to her early, so a podium career seemed inevitable, especially when she developed vocal problems when she was 12.
When she was 15, her high school violin teacher asked her to arrange a performance for a group. It turned into six months of early training for potential young conductors offered free by Bavaria, the German state.
“When I did it for the first time, I felt immediately I was touching the sound with my hands, forming this energy in front of me,” she recalled.
“But I didn’t know if other people would see it the same way, if they would respond to my gestures, which were quite intuitive," she said. "I like to think this is a very deep desire to communicate through my body.”
Handler was only 17 when she formed her own student ensemble, naming the group Enigma Classica.
She enrolled at The Juilliard School in 2021, the prestigious New York City performing arts conservatory.
After a live audition, she received a Kovner Fellowship, an all-expenses paid “free ride” through the two-year program, and earned a master’s degree in conducting.
“It really let me grow wings,” Handler emphasized. “It changed everything.”
While there, she had the opportunity to conduct a portion of “Jurassic Park” for John Williams, who was visiting the school while on tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Videos demonstrating her conducting prowess in front of the Juilliard Orchestra attracted interest from agents who connected her to the LA Philharmonic, where she was named a (Gustavo) Dudamel Fellow and bonded with composer John Adams, who became a mentor.
That assistant conducting post led her to conduct a Hollywood Bowl concert with the orchestra last month, and a scheduled subscription concert next March.
In January 2023, she came in a close second when she auditioned for a Boston Symphony assistant conducting slot (Samy Rashid, the BSO’s other assistant conductor, won that position.)
A year later, encouraged by Tony Fogg, the orchestra’s vice president of artistic planning, she auditioned again — this time successfully — for the two-year role.
"We are absolutely thrilled and so lucky to have Anna as part of the BSO family," said Cathy Basrak, the BSO's assistant principal viola and Boston Pops principal viola. "She is an unbelievably passionate and curious musician, and she gives absolutely everything in her conducting and musical interpretations. She's the truest kind of musician and her kindness and musical connection is very evident in her style and approach to music."
At the BSO, an assistant conductor needs to win the trust of the musicians “because you’re part of the family, which is really precious,” said Handler. “So, honor that trust and take any chance you can to learn and become better, because the ultimate goal at the end of these two years, ideally I’ll have some music director position somewhere; that’s my dream. I feel the most responsibility to the musicians and their precious time.”
“I’ll go wherever people think I can do something for the community and the orchestra,” Handler said. “I see this as a very social profession, so I would really like to get to know the people in front. I would really like to take responsibility for a group and move to wherever I become music director.”
Making music accessible is a high priority, she added. “That’s why I’m so eager to share my journey on Instagram because right now I’m still young and accessible to teenage students.”
“My listening journey is step-by-step; there are still a lot of pieces I haven’t heard live,” Handler acknowledged. “If someone doesn’t pull you in emotionally, you can get lost in this forest of notes.”
The challenge to draw younger audiences to concerts? “How can we make people fall in love with listening, because this is all about feeling and absorbing sounds, converting them into emotions,” said Handler. “The composers translate their inner feelings into sounds. It’s a language you have to be exposed to, to listen and learn.”
She considers film music is “a big factor pulling people into this world. Social media is also helpful.”
“I’m not worried about the future of classical music,” Handler said, but she did voice concern that people may have become somewhat insensitive, “and music is such a tool to make something softer inside of us.”
Asked if gender no longer matters and women have equal opportunities as conductors, Handler said she feels “liberated from that thought because I see myself first as a human and as a soul and then as a woman. I grew up in a household where I believed I could be anything I want to, if I’m passionate about it and if I work for it and find the right mentors.”
For Handler, “conducting means I leave some part of me somewhere, a bit like a trance, it’s very weird, like I’m connecting to this universal energy in front of me and I’m just guiding it.”