Marek Janowski

Marek Janowski was born in Warsaw in 1939 and was raised and educated in Germany. He learned his trade in the German opera system, as a répétiteur and then as a conductor in Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Hamburg, before becoming general music director in Freiburg and Dortmund. From the late 1970s he appeared at the leading opera houses of the world, and he made the first digital recording of Wagner’s complete Ring with the Staatskapelle Dresden between 1980 and 1983. He later concentrated on the concert hall, leading the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (1984 to 2000), the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and, from 2002, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, with which he performed Wagner’s ten major operas in concert at the Philharmonie between 2010 and 2013. He was also twice chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic. He is regarded as a leading interpreter of the Austro-German symphonic tradition, Bruckner and Strauss in particular, and of Wagner.