Teodor Currentzis: the conductor Europe keeps booking and keeps asking to speak

Teodor Currentzis

Photo: Olya Runyova / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 24, 1972 Athens, Greece
Occupation	Conductor
Awards	Golden Mask · ECHO Klassik · Commander of the Order of the Phoenix

With Utopia, most of the players stand. The conductor leaves the podium mid-movement and walks into the strings, and a hall in Hamburg or Salzburg hears music it assumed it knew as though the ink were still wet. Teodor Currentzis has built a career on that sensation. He has also made a second thing into a fixture of his public life: the statement he will not give. Europe keeps booking him, critics keep calling his readings the most alive in the room, and part of the same public keeps asking why a man who talks so freely about Mozart and death says nothing about the country he chose to live in.

Both stories run through the same person, and neither cancels the other. That is what makes him hard to write about, and harder to programme.

Music was already in the house in Athens, where his mother was a pianist; Currentzis, born there on 24 February 1972, started lessons at the keyboard at four and added the violin a few years later. At twelve he entered the National Conservatory in Athens; at fifteen he was studying composition. By eighteen he had put together a chamber orchestra of his own. The decisive move came in 1994, when an Onassis Foundation scholarship took him to the St Petersburg Conservatory to study conducting with Ilya Musin, the teacher of Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov, then in his nineties. Currentzis stayed five years in the class and, in the end, stayed in Russia.

His first real laboratory was Siberia. As principal conductor of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre he founded musicAeterna in 2004, an orchestra and later a choir recruited from across the country, and taught it to play Baroque and Classical repertoire on gut strings, in period style, at a time when few Russian ensembles bothered. In 2011 he took the whole company to Perm, a provincial city more than 1,300 kilometres east of Moscow, as artistic director of its opera house. From 2012 he also ran the city’s Diaghilev Festival. The theatre’s programme director, Dmitri Renansky, later described Perm in those years as Russia’s third musical capital, and the claim was not absurd.

Perm is where the recordings that made his name outside Russia were made. Sony Classical signed him in 2014, and the Mozart operas came first: Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte that year, Don Giovanni in 2016. The Rite of Spring followed in 2015 and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in 2017. In the theatre his natural ally was Peter Sellars: together they made Iolanta/Perséphone for the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2012 and Purcell’s The Indian Queen a year later, whose DVD won an ECHO Klassik. At home he collected nine Golden Masks, Russia’s national theatre prize. In 2014 he also took Russian citizenship.

The West opened its doors in quick succession. In 2017 musicAeterna became the first Russian ensemble to open the Salzburg Festival. A year later came a BBC Proms debut and the post of first chief conductor of the SWR Symphonieorchester in Stuttgart. In 2019 he left the Perm theatre and turned musicAeterna into an independent institution based at Dom Radio in St Petersburg, backed since that year by the state-owned VTB Bank.

That sponsorship is where the critical account of Currentzis begins. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 he issued no public position. In April 2022 the Vienna Konzerthaus cancelled, a day before it was due, a benefit concert for people in need in Ukraine featuring his ensemble, and asked the group to secure independent funding. In June, VTB’s head, Andrey Kostin, said at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that Currentzis had met him after the invasion and intended to stay in Russia. The Kölner Philharmonie cancelled in January 2023, with similar decisions in Munich, Paris and Hamburg; in February 2024 the Wiener Festwochen dropped him after the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv refused to share its programme. His defence has not moved: musicians, he says, have no flags, and in a 2025 interview with Der Spiegel he claimed a right to silence. His ensemble’s manager, Ilja Chakhov, adds that he stayed out of loyalty to some 250 musicians. The difficulty is that silence stops being neutral once the orchestra’s rent is paid by a state bank. For his supporters it protects those players. His critics hear a position in it, and nothing he has said since has changed their minds.

His answer, in practice, was a second orchestra. Utopia gave its first concerts in October 2022 in Luxembourg, Hamburg, Vienna and Berlin: more than a hundred musicians from over thirty countries, reassembled for each project and funded by ticket revenue and private European patrons, with a residence at Funkhaus Berlin since 2023. The ensemble dates the idea to 2018, before any of this. In June 2024 he left the SWR a year ahead of his contract; the broadcaster said the choice was his own and not political. The same year he launched his own label, Theta, with Outhere Music, opening with Bruckner’s Ninth and Mahler’s Third.

This year has shown both sides of him in public at once. In spring Utopia toured Mahler’s First Symphony and Berg’s Violin Concerto with Vilde Frang from Berlin to Bologna. At the Salzburg Festival he conducted a new Carmen staged by Gabriela Carrizo of the dance-theatre company Peeping Tom, with Asmik Grigorian and Jonathan Tetelman, eight performances between 26 July and 26 August. Reviewers argued over the choreography and largely agreed on the pit, where he stretched and compressed tempi until Bizet sounded newly considered. Then an older role returned. In DAU, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s project shot largely between 2008 and 2011 on a reconstructed Soviet research institute in Kharkiv, Currentzis plays the physicist Lev Landau. On 12 September the Venice Film Festival gave Khrzhanovsky the Silver Lion for Best Director, after a premiere that drew protest aimed partly at Currentzis’s presence.

November takes him back on the road with Utopia, pairing The Rite of Spring with Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto in Paris on 6 November, Baden-Baden on 7, Munich on 9 and the Berlin Philharmonie on 10. He then makes his first visit to South Korea, six years after a pandemic cancelled the original plan, with two nights at Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul on 17 and 18 November, before Suntory Hall in Tokyo on 23 November. The question he refuses to answer will travel with him to each of those halls; so far, the only reply he has offered comes from the orchestra.

Selected Recordings

Dido & Aeneas (2008)
Symphonie no. 14 (2010)
Requiem (2011)
Piano Concertos / Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 134 (2012)
Le nozze di Figaro (2014)
The Sound of Light (2014)
Le Sacre du Printemps (2015)
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto / Stravinsky: Les Noces (2016)
Symphony no. 6 “Pathétique” (2017)
Symphony no. 6 (2018)
Symphony no. 5 (2020)
Symphony no. 7 (2021)

Tags: singers, DAU, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Teodor Currentzis, Carmen, conductors

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