Conductor Johann-Sebastian Guzman’s career has been propelled by a series of leaps into the unknown, driven by avid musical curiosity and fostered by a series of mentors compelled by his passion, talent, and boldness.
One of the first was Frost School of Music associate professor Tian Ying. In high school Guzman, whose parents couldn’t afford private lessons, emailed Ying and asked the accomplished pianist for help. “I said “professor, can I play for you?”” remembers Guzman. “I want more, I need more, I need to learn.” Ying invited him to campus, listened to him play, and then asked “Do you want to come back next week?”
He gave Guzman lessons and support that led to him receiving a full scholarship, graduating from the Frost School in 2017 with a degree in piano performance. But his Frost School studies were just part of Gusman’s remarkable musical journey, which has led him to work with some of the world’s greatest conductors and taken him around the world.
“In Spanish there’s a saying "dreaming doesn't cost a thing",” Guzman, 30, said from his home in Vienna, where he graduated from the conducting program at the renowned University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, whose alumni include Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, and numerous famous conductors. “But you have to work hard, find the opportunities. If you knock on someone’s door, the worst thing they can say is no.”
Guzman attributes his optimistic, resolute attitude to his parents, who emigrated to Miami from Colombia in 1992, undaunted by Hurricane Andrew, which had just devastated the city. “Their story is working hard, let’s find a better future, the American dream,” he said. His mother says she named him for a character on a favorite telenovela and not for the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. But the connection seems fortuitous. As a child, Guzman was always drumming on anything he could find, including the car ceiling, tearing the fabric. He rejected violin lessons because he couldn’t bear his four-year-old efforts. (“I could tell I sounded terrible,” he said.) Instead, the band at the family’s church, intrigued by the little boy banging out rhythms, gave him a pair of claves and later upgraded him to a drumset.
He went on to choir and music programs at a succession of arts magnet schools, and began learning piano, largely teaching himself to play and read music. He once astonished his father by playing some Chopin and Rachmaninoff that he learned by ear from the salsa song “El Bestial Sonido.” He joined the Miami Children’s Chorus (MCC), which sometimes sang with the Florida Grand Opera (FGO), including “La Boheme” when Guzman was in middle school. He was immediately enraptured.
“I listened to it once and I couldn’t stop,” Guzman said. “It completely changed my perception of sound and what I wanted to do with my life. That’s where I made the connection to the world I’m in now.”
Ying said Guzman’s drive and musical understanding set him apart. “From our very first lessons, it was clear that he possessed not only exceptional talent, but also a rare musical imagination and an inquisitive, intellectually engaged mind,” he said.
“Many years ago, while we were both at a music festival in Italy, Johann conducted the final concerto competition concert. It was then that I realized his gifts extended far beyond the piano. Despite being largely self-taught as a conductor at that time, he displayed remarkable instinct, confidence, and an unmistakably individual presence on the podium. It became evident that conducting was a natural extension of his artistry.”
Guzman formed a relationship with Ramon Tebar, the conductor of the FGO, attending opera rehearsals and becoming Tebar’s assistant conductor at the Palm Beach Symphony, where Tebar was music director. After graduating from the Frost School, he emailed Andrés Orozco-Estrada, a famous Colombian conductor who was the music director of the Houston Symphony, and flew to Houston, staying with a cousin, to watch him lead rehearsal. When the conductor asked “what do you want?” Guzman replied “I want to be like you. What do I have to do?” Orozco told him he should study at the University of Vienna. Guzman began training and learning German, and in 2018 became one of six out of more than 90 applicants from around the world accepted into the school’s conducting program—where Orozco was one of his teachers.
In their intense, years-long program, he found the knowledge he’d yearned for. “It gave me all the tools I was missing from teaching myself how to read the bass clef in elementary school,” he said. “They said you need to learn fundamentals first, then you can start interpreting.” The renowned school in the storied home of Mozart and so much of European classical music history offered a platform to practice and connect, allowing Guzman to become music director of the TU Orchestra of the Technical University of Vienna.
“The first six months I was scared, sweating, I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “Then I started learning how to interpret the musical ideas in my head into a gesture that becomes sound, to translate what I need and want to people. When I understood we are all part of an organism that shifts and is malleable, that’s when I started understanding what a conductor can be.”
He also reached out to Daniel Harding, another renowned conductor who was music director of the Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Harding asked him to come to Rome to help on a recording of “Tosca,” which Guzman had sung with the MCC and FGO. At the first rehearsal with the orchestra, which wasn’t used to playing with singers, he offered to sing the opera for them. “Can you do that?” asked Harding. Guzman sang the entire opera in the course of the three-hour rehearsal, earning the respect of the orchestra and a position as assistant conductor, working closely with Harding for several years and touring with the Santa Cecilia orchestra in Europe and Asia.
When Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezuelan phenomenon who is the artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, came to conduct the Santa Cecilia orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” Guzman flew to Rome from Miami during his few days off between two weekends of work here. During rehearsal, he heard a problem with the woodwinds and nervously approached Dudamel. “He is so famous and high up,” said Guzman. “He looks at me like who the hell are you to interrupt me? But I said what I had to about the woodwinds. I did my job. He stood there for two seconds, then said ok, fixed it, and looked at me and said “good job”. From that moment he started trusting me.”
That led to Guzman cover conducting, a form of assisting, for Dudamel at the New York Philharmonic this spring, where he met and bonded with Valentina Paolucci, a violinist turned conductor who is also a child of immigrants and a Frost School alumna. “We helped each other out,” Guzman said. “It was so nice to meet someone with the same kind of story also doing what they love.”
Now Guzman is working to move beyond assisting to establishing himself as a conductor. He was thrilled to be appointed resident conductor for the Vienna Volksoper for the upcoming season, and also has guest engagements in Colombia and Europe. He hopes to continue working with Harding, who in 2027 will take Dudamel’s old job as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and to expand his network and experience. He’d love to conduct a concert with Ying, with whom he’s stayed close, at the piano. He dreams of someday being the music director of a major orchestra or opera company.
He also hopes to build a Miami non-profit, named Ventanita Productions after the city’s distinctive Cuban coffee counters, which he started with a friend and would support music, culture and eager kids like he was. “There is so much talent and community and culture in Miami,” he said. “But a lot of us leave. My dream is to incentivize the community to give back to itself, to filter the hustle into cultural events. Music is a beautiful thing. We need everyone doing it.”
