Alain Altinoglu

Alain Altinoglu, born in Paris in 1975 to a family of Armenian descent, is among the most versatile French conductors of his generation, equally at home in the opera house and on the concert platform. Trained at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he later returned to teach conducting, he built his early reputation in the opera house, at leading theatres in Europe and America and at the Bayreuth Festival, earning a name for the clarity, flexibility, and dramatic instinct he brings to a wide span of repertoire, from Mozart and the French and Italian traditions to Wagner and the twentieth century. Since 2016 he has been Music Director of La Monnaie, the Brussels opera house, and in 2021 he also became chief conductor of the hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt Radio Symphony). A conductor with an especially keen ear for orchestral colour and for the French repertoire that lies close to his roots, Altinoglu is ideally suited to this afternoon’s journey from Gershwin’s jazz-tinged Concerto in F through the shifting hues of Dutilleux’s Métaboles to the hypnotic, ever-brightening machine of Ravel’s Boléro, a programme that turns the orchestra itself into the subject.