Sylvain Cambreling

Born in Amiens in northern France in 1948, Sylvain Cambreling began his career in 1971 as a trombonist in the orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon; at the same time, he also studied conducting. Following a year as an assistant to Serge Baudo, he was appointed Deputy Music Director of the Opéra de Lyon in 1975 (until 1981); in 1976 Pierre Boulez engaged him as Permanent Guest Conductor with the Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris. For ten years, from 1981 to 1991, Cambreling was Music Director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels; he held the same position at Frankfurt Opera from 1993 to 1997 and at the Stuttgart Staatsoper from 2012 to 2018. He has additionally made guest appearances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, the Opéra national de Paris, and the Vienna Staatsoper. Cambreling first appeared at the Salzburg Festival in 1985 and regularly conducted opera productions there during the era of Gerard Mortier, including Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and Berio’s Cronaca del luogo. Sylvain Cambreling was Principal Guest Conductor of the Klangforum Wien from 1997 to 2004; he stood at the helm of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg from 1999 to 2011 and, from 2010 to 2019, led the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, which subsequently named him its Honorary Conductor. Cambreling has served as Principal Conductor with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra since 2018. He has worked with many major orchestras as a guest conductor: the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. His complete recording of Messiaen’s orchestral works received the German Record Critics’ Annual Prize in 2009 and the Cannes Classical Award in 2010. He is a Chevalier in the French Légion d’honneur and a recipient of the German Federal Cross of Merit.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 2 September 2000 in works by Rihm, Hosokawa, and Kurtág, performed by the Klangforum Wien.

August 2022