Antonello Manacorda

Antonello Manacorda was a founding member and longstanding leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, founded by Claudio Abbado, before he completed his conducting studies with Jorma Panula. He conducts at the world’s most renowned opera houses and often appears on the podium with leading symphony orchestras. Since 2010 he has been artistic director of the Kammerakademie Potsdam, with which he has made a number of award-winning recordings.

In the 2022/23 season he conducted opera productions at the Paris Opéra (Die Zauberflöte), the Berlin State Opera (Jenůfa), the Vienna State Opera (Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly) and the Semperoper Dresden (Der Freischütz). He appeared as a guest conductor with orchestras including the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia.

In recent seasons Antonello Manacorda has made debuts with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (Le nozze di Figaro) and conducted a new production of Der Freischütz at the Bavarian State Opera. In 2021 he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival with the Mozarteum Orchestra.

Antonello Manacorda has recorded cycles of Mendelssohn’s and Schubert’s symphonies for Sony with the Kammerakademie Potsdam, which was named ensemble of the year at the 2015 ECHO Klassik Awards for its Schubert cycle. In October 2022 Manacorda and the Kammerakademie Potsdam received an OPUS Klassik in the same category. They are currently continuing the Beethoven cycle that they began last year with a recording of the composer’s First, Second and Seventh Symphonies with one of his central Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. This recording will be released in October 2023.

Antonello Manacorda sees himself as an orchestral practitioner whose creative power is combined with the need for a collaborative style of music making. His versatility as a conductor derives from an abundance of musical and cultural influences: he was born into an Italian-French family in Turin, trained in Amsterdam and has lived in Berlin for many years.