Teodor Currentzis

Artistic Director

Teodor Currentzis was born in Greece, where he began his early professional development in performance, composition, and conducting. At the age of 22, he moved to Saint Petersburg to study conducting with Ilya Musin, the renowned founder of the Soviet conducting school and a legendary figure in Leningrad’s cultural scene. Currentzis was among Musin’s last students, learning from him the fundamental principles of mastery and the basics of his dicэinctive approach to musical art.

Since the early 2000s, Teodor Currentzis has become a prominent figure in Russian musical life. After taking charge of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre in 2004, he founded his own ensemble — the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir — which later became one of the most significant artistic phenomena in 21st-century Russia.

The core principle of musicAeterna’s work is an exceptional pursuit of perfection and the atmosphere of a group of like-minded individuals, which has fostered a unique artistic focus and a high level of artistic responsibility. Currentzis began his career as a conductor who paid special attention to the principles of historically informed performance. However, his interests quickly expanded from the Baroque repertoire to include classical and contemporary music.

In 2011, Currentzis took up the post of the Artistic Director of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, with musicAeterna members following him. Since 2012, he has also led the Perm Diaghilev Festival, which has gained international prestige and helped make Perm a new cultural landmark — not only on the Russian, but also on the global map. In 2019, Teodor Currentzis and musicAeterna relocated to Saint Petersburg to take residence at Dom Radio, a cultural space that combines the functions of an academic concert hall, an underground art centre, an art gallery, and a lecture hall.

Currentzis’s international concert career is highly extensive. From the 2016/17 to the 2022/23 season, he was a resident at the Vienna Konzerthaus, where he conducted his ensembles as well as the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Camerata Salzburg. From 2018 to 2024, he was the Chief Conductor of the SWR Symphonieorchester. In 2022, Teodor Currentzis founded Utopia, an international festival orchestra and choir bringing together some of the best musicians from several dozen countries. He performs at the most important European and international venues, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg, the Paris Philharmonic, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, The Shed in New York, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Royal Albert Hall in London, La Scala, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the Zaryadye Concert Hall, and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Hall.

As a theatre conductor, Teodor Currentzis drew significant attention in 2009 when he led the Paris Opera orchestra in a production of Verdi’s Macbeth, staged by him and director Dmitry Chernyakov at the initiative of Gerard Mortier. In 2013, he made his debut at the Ruhrtriennale Festival in Bochum, and in 2015 at the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival with Peter Sellars’s Iolanthe/Persephone to the music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, staged at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2012. Since 2017, Currentzis has been a regular participant of the Salzburg Festival. As a conductor and music director, he collaborates with the world-renowned stage directors such as Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci, Peter Sellars, Theodoros Terzopoulos, and others, working in the largest opera houses across Europe and Russia.

Studio recording represents a distinct aspect of Teodor Currentzis’s professional career. His first CDs — Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Mozart’s Requiem — became a sensation, provoking both admiration and shock with their interpretative novelty. A trilogy of Mozart–da Ponte operas released in the 2010s played a special role in consolidating his reputation as ‘a studio artist’. Currentzis’s discography features recordings on the Sony Classical label — works by Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rameau, and Stravinsky — awarded with ECHO Klassik, Edison Klassiek, awards from Opernwelt and BBC Music Magazine, the Deutscher Kritikerpreis for Sound recording, and the Japanese Academy of Recording. In 2024, he founded the Theta label in partnership with Outhere Music.

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