Richard Hein

Biography

Richard Hein was the conductor of the State Opera Prague from 1997 to 2011, since 2012 he has been the conductor of the National Theatre Opera in Prague. He studied conducting with Milan Horvat and Wolfgang Bozic at the Hochschule für Musik in Graz, Austria. He started as an opera conductor in 1993 at the Silesian Theatre in Opava, from where he moved on to Prague via the opera houses in Olomouc, Plzeň and Brno. During his Prague engagement, he has conducted performances of a number of productions, including Verdi's Il trovatore, Aida, Don Carlos, La traviata and Rigoletto, Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot, Bizet's Carmen, Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni, and Janáček's Jenůfa, among many others. Since 1999, he had conducted at the summer Opera Mozart festival at the Estates Theatre in Prague. He worked with a number of opera and symphony orchestras, with whom he recorded for the ORF radio station and performed in the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Japan. He collaborated with the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra Ostrava, the Moravian Philharmonic Olomouc, Plzeň Philharmonic and the West Bohemia Symphony Orchestra in Mariánské Lázně. He participated as a performer and teacher in the international Toujours Mozart project. Since 2001, he has been the artistic director of the Harmonia Mozartiana Pragensis ensemble. In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious Culture Prize of the City of Augsburg, Germany.