Lorenzo Viotti

Lorenzo Viotti, born in Lausanne in 1990, is one of the most closely watched conductors of his generation, and one with an unusually intimate connection to the orchestra he leads in this concert. The son of the conductor Marcello Viotti, he first studied piano, voice, and percussion in Lyon before moving to Vienna for Georg Mark’s conducting class, and during those Vienna years he played as an orchestral percussionist, including with the Vienna Philharmonic itself, giving him the rare experience of having sat inside this orchestra before ever standing in front of it. He completed his conducting studies in Weimar with Nicolás Pasquet in 2015, the same year he won the Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award.

Viotti was Music Director of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon from 2018 to 2021, then Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam from 2021 to 2025, where his opera performances and unbuttoned approach to concert presentation won him an audience well beyond the usual concert-going public. He becomes Music Director of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra from the 2026–27 season and Generalmusikdirektor of Zurich Opera from 2028–29. His programmes often champion exactly the repertoire heard tonight: French orchestral music and the lush, neglected scores of fin-de-siècle Vienna.