Riccardo Chailly

Since 2016, Riccardo Chailly has served as Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra; his contract runs through 2028. Born in Milan in 1953, Chailly studied at the conservatories of Perugia, Rome, and Milan, as well as at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, and began his career as an assistant to Claudio Abbado at La Scala in Milan. In 1980, he was appointed Chief Conductor of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra; he moved to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the same position in 1988, leading the ensemble for 16 years. From 2005 to 2016, he served as Gewandhauskapellmeister in Leipzig; since January 2015 he has been Music Director at Teatro alla Scala, a post he will retain through the current season. Chailly has conducted such leading European orchestras as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre de Paris. In the United States, he has worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, he has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London, Zurich Opera, the Bavarian Staatsoper, and the Vienna Staatsoper, as well as in Chicago and San Francisco. Chailly is an exclusive artist with the Decca Classics label and has received numerous honors for his more than 150 recordings, including the Echo Klassik and the Gramophone Award. His latest releases include Verdi opera choruses issued in February 2023 for his 70th birthday, followed in 2024 by Quattro pezzi sacri and Inno delle nazioni. In 2015, he published a book of conversations about music titled Il segreto è nelle pause. Chailly holds the titles of Grand’Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, Cavaliere di Gran Croce, and Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. In 1996 he was named an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London; since 2011 he has held the rank of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 7 September 1988 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam in a program of works by Wagenaar, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky

February 2026