Baldur Brönnimann, who was born in 1968, studied at the Music Academy of his native Basel and at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and has established himself as one of the world's leading conductors of contemporary music. He has worked with such composers as John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, Harrison Birtwistle, Unsuk Chin, Helmut Lachenmann, Magnus Lindberg, and Georg Friedrich Haas and has been invited to festivals including the BBC Proms, Wien Modern, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and Mostly Mozart at New York’s Lincoln Center. He conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia from 2008 to 2012 and the Norwegian Ensemble BIT20 from , from 2011 to 2015. He has been principal conductor of the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música since 2015 and, since 2016, of the Basel Sinfonietta. Brönnimann is a regular guest with such new music ensembles as Klangforum Wien and the Ensemble intercontemporain, with which he performed a concert in honor of Pierre Boulez at the BBC Proms in 2016. As an opera conductor, he has led Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre at the Komische Oper Berlin, English National Opera, and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where he also conducted Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzer and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. He has conducted Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin at the Bergen International Festival and Norwegian Opera and Fausto Romitelli’s Index of Metals at the Theater an der Wien. Brönnimann attaches great importance to the innovative communication of music, not least through unusual program through which he questions the traditional boundaries of classical music. Among the highlights of the past season were his return to the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt and to the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, with which he performed Dieter Schnebel’s Symphony X at the Musikverein, as well as his debut with the Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 20 August 2011 with the HELIX ensemble in works by Georg Friedrich Haas.
August 2020