Oliver Dohnányi

Biography

He studied conducting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague with Václav Neumann, at Musikhochschule in Vienna with Otmar Suitner, and attended master classes given by the conductors Luca Franco Ferrari and Igor Markevitch. After completing his studies, he first conducted the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava, later on becoming principal conductor of the Slovak National Theatre Opera and conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra. With the Slovak National Theatre Opera he presented at the Edinburgh Festival an acclaimed production of Gounod’s Faust and later on conducted at the festival a concert performance of Smetana’s Libuše. Between 1993 and 1996 and from 2004 to 2007 he was principal conductor of Prague’s National Theatre Opera. Here he prepared, for example, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Bellini’s Norma, Verdi’s Rigoletto and Aida, Puccini’s La bohème and Tosca, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, Smetana’s Libuše and The Bartered Bride. As a guest conductor, he has worked for operas in Buenos Aires, Zurich, Basel, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna, Munich, Düsseldorf, Naples, London, Leeds, and Wexford. He has collaborated with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo), St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, London Mozart Players, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Northern Philharmonic Orchestra Leeds, Chicago Symphonietta, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and other domestic and foreign orchestras. At the 2007/2008 season he was the Director of the Slovak National Theatre Opera in Bratislava. At the present time, Oliver Dohnányi is the chief of the Opera of the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre in Ostrava. He also teaches in the Conducting Department at the Faculty of Music of Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts. Update: September 2008