Antonello Manacorda

The son of an Italian-French family, Antonello Manacorda was born in Turin in 1970. He studied violin with Sergio Lamberto at the conservatory of his native city and then with Herman Krebbers in Amsterdam. Claudio Abbado appointed him concertmaster of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in 1994, and in 1997 he co-founded the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, leading this ensemble as concertmaster for several years. He was also involved in the founding of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2003. Before that, in 2001, he took up conducting studies with Jorma Panula and subsequently switched to working on the podium. In 2010, he was appointed Chief Conductor of the Kammerakademie Potsdam, with which he has released numerous award-winning CDs, including a recording of the complete Schubert symphonies that won the Echo Klassik Award in 2016 and an account of the last three Mozart symphonies that received the Opus Klassik Prize in 2022. All nine Beethoven symphonies are featured on his latest release, which appeared in May 2024. Manacorda is a much sought-after opera conductor. He has led Mozart’s Da Ponte trilogy at the Theater an der Wien and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels; in 2019, he conducted Gluck’s Alceste at the Bavarian Staatsoper and, in 2020, Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio at the Vienna Staatsoper. Other credits include Mozart’s Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Weber’s Der Freischütz at the Dresden Semperoper, and Verdi’s La traviata and Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House in London. In the 2024-25 season, he will perform Figaro at Zurich Opera and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra national de Paris. In the concert hall, Manacorda has worked with the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Royal Stockholm and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestras, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestra Nazionale dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia. In the 2023-24 season, he also conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the SWR Symphonieorchester.

April 2024