Oliver Dohnányi, MgA.

General Director, Prague State Opera

Oliver von Dohnányi was born in Trenčín, Slovakia. He studied conducting and violin at the Bratislava Conservatoire, then pursued his training with Professors Václav Neumann and Alois Klíma at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Prague, and with Prof. Otmar Suitner at the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He furthered his skills in master classes of renowned conductors Igor Markevitch, Arvid Jansons, and Franco Ferarra. Achieving success in the final rounds of several major conducting contests (including the Hungarian Television Conducting Competition in Budapest, 1983; or the Prague Spring Talich Conducting Competition, 1985); he won the prestigious Premio Respighi in Italy.

In 1979 he became a conductor of the Bratislava Radio Symphony Orchestra, a post where he was active for seven years. He made an impressive list of symphony and opera recordings for Slovak Radio, many of which were released on such labels as Naxos, Marco Polo, Supraphon, Panton, Verga, and Opus. In 1986 he took over as principal conductor of the Slovak National Theatre opera, where he created several remarkable opera productions, including Prince Igor (Borodin), Tosca (Puccini), La Sonnambula (Bellini), Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rossini), The Bartered Bride (Smetana), Rigoletto (Verdi), and others. His farewell production, Gounod’s Faust, staged there by Jozef Bednárik, marked a breakthrough in the opera tradition thus far established at Bratislava, and won exceptional acclaim of audiences, not just in the former Czechoslovakia, but also internationally, in Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Israel. In the United Kingdom, the production won Special Award in the Music category. Maestro Dohnányi took the Slovak National Theatre opera company on numerous international tours, visiting among other countries Spain, Germany, Russia, Hungary, the Netherlands, and China. In parallel with his work there, he was likewise active as a conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in Bratislava, and as a permanent guest conductor of the Capella Istropolitana chamber orchestra with which he reaped triumphs both in the recording studios, and on numerous concert tours and festival appearances (the Bologna Festival in Italy, German and Austrian tours, and a concert series for the Austrian Radio, ORF).

From 1993 – 1996, and again from 2004 – 2007, he was conductor-in-chief of the National Theatre in Prague. There, he prepared and conducted many opera and ballet productions, including among others Smetana’s Libuše and The Bartered Bride, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Puccini’s La Bohème and Tosca, Verdi’s Rigoletto, Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, Bellini’s Norma, Prokofiev’s Cinderella, or Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro. With the last three, he scored remarkable successes during the company’s regular Japanese tours.

Elsewhere, Oliver von Dohnányi conducted the English National Opera’s productions of Boito’s Mefistofele, Verdi’s Falstaff, and Lehár’s operetta Die lustige Witwe. In 1998 he was in charge of a concert production of Smetana’s Libuše at the Edinburgh Festival. For many seasons a guest conductor of Opera North in Leeds, where he conducted productions of Carmen (Bizet), Hamlet (Thomas) and La Gioconda (Ponchielli), as well as two major vehicles of the Czech opera repertoire, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Dvořák’s Rusalka. Since 1999 he has conducted at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, where he has to his credit productions of Macbeth (Verdi), and Roméo et Juliette (Gounod). In 2000 he made his American debut, with the Chicago Sinfonietta. His recording of the television opera, Memento Mori, by Slovak composer Juraj Filas, with the Prague Symphony Orchestra, won a special prize at the Salzburg Television Festival. Since 2001, he has worked regularly with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. In 2004, he made a highly successful appearance at the famed Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina, conducting Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

From March 2006, he held the post of artistic director of opera at the National Theatre of Moravia and Silesia in Ostrava; in June 2006 he was appointed principal conductor of the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava; and since the same year, he has simultaneously been permanent guest conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic and of the Croatian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Zagreb. Since 2007, he has been permanent guest conductor of the Staatsoper Stuttgart. In March 2007 he conducted a new production of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride at the Baltimore Opera in the USA.

As a guest conductor, Oliver von Dohnányi has directed with formidable success a long list of prominent international orchestras, including among others, the Yomiuri Nippon Tokyo, St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Hungarian National Philharmonic, the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra, the Brno State Philharmonic, the Czech Philharmonic, the English Chamber Orchestra, the London Mozart Players, the English Northern Philharmonia, the RSO Lugano, I Solisti di Napoli, the RSO Saarbrücken, the RSO Basel, the Porto Philharmonic, the Irish National Philharmonic, the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Glasgow, or the Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires.