Assistant Conductor Chosen

Elizabeth Stoyanovich, one of two staff conductors at the Cincinnati Symphony, has been appointed assistant conductor of the Pacific Symphony and music director of the Pacific Symphony Orchestral Institute and Youth Orchestra. She will be the first woman to hold the positions.

Her two-year contract begins Aug. 1. Stoyanovich, 34, succeeds Edward Cumming, who will become assistant conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony in the fall.

A native of Wisconsin who lives in Lexington, Ky., Stoyanovich studied oboe and conducting at the University of Michigan, the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. Her conducting mentors included Leonard Bernstein, Otto Werner-Mueller and Gustav Meier.

She joined the Cincinnati Symphony in 1993, leading the orchestra’s educational outreach concerts and serving as music director of its Youth Orchestra. She also has been music director of the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra and the Champlain Valley Symphony in New York. She has taught at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

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Pacific Symphony Executive Director Louis Spisto said Tuesday that Stoyanovich was one of six finalists here, each of whom conducted the orchestra in rehearsals.

“We’re delighted,” Spisto said. “We think Elizabeth is a very talented young conductor who has the ability to relate to the community, especially with the work she will do with the training orchestras,” the Institute orchestra, based at Cal State Fullerton, and the Youth Orchestra at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Los Alamitos.

She and her husband, Patrick, a jazz and classical pianist and composer, have two daughters, Antonia, 2, and Sophia, 2 months.