Christian Thielemann

A native of Berlin, Christian Thielemann has been general music director of the Munich Philharmonic since 2004. He began his career as a typical German Kapellmeister, gleaning twenty years' experience of numerous smaller opera houses before ultimately concentrating on selected orchestras and a mere handful of houses. Between 1997 and 2004 he was general music director of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Not least as a result of his Berlin performances of the whole of the Bayreuth canon as well as his interpretations of the operas of Richard Strauss, Christian Thielemann is now one of the most sought-after conductors in the world. His operatic repertory extends from Mozart to Schoenberg and Henze. He has appeared in all the world's leading opera houses, including the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Vienna State Opera, where he conducted a new production of Tristan und Isolde in 2003 and a revival of Parsifal in 2005. He has conducted the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Israel Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. In the United States he works regularly with the orchestras in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. He first started to work closely with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2000, the year of his Bayreuth Festival début with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. 

Engagements in Bayreuth