The versatile conductor Franck Ollu is recognized internationally as an expert in contemporary music and French repertory. In 2025, he performed with Les Siècles in cities including Paris, Munich, Berlin and Bucharest to mark the centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth.
He is a regular guest at the international festivals of Aix-en-Provence, Aldeburgh, Amsterdam, Dresden, Salzburg and Vienna and has worked with renowned orchestras such as the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Polish Radio Orchestra, the Orquesta Nacional de España, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI and the Basel Chamber Orchestra. From 2003 to 2013 he was the music director of the Swedish KammarensembleN.
His close collaboration with Ensemble Modern has included performances of George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, Heiner Goebbels’s Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten, Helmut Oehring’s Die WUNDE Heine and Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Baroque cantata Il serpente di bronzo in a double bill with the world premiere of Saed Haddad’s A Wintery Spring, as well as the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s … ce qui arrive …. In 2025, he and Ensemble Modern were guests at Radio France’s Festival Présences, and in 2026 they return to the Salzburg Festival.
Franck Ollu has conducted numerous world premieres, including Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill at the Paris Opéra in 2006, Pascal Dusapin’s Passion at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2008, Johannes Wallmann’s SOLO-UNIVERS 1—5 at the Berlin Philharmonie in 2010, Dusapin’s Penthesilea at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2015 and Thierry Escaich’s Shirine at the Opéra de Lyon in 2022.
Important opera productions have also included the first French performance of Dusapin’s Macbeth Underworld at the Opéra Comique in 2023 and Rihm’s Jakob Lenz and Das Gehege, Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, Xenakis’s Oresteia and Benjamin’s Written on Skin. He also conducted Dusapin’s Medeamaterial at the Salzburg Festival in 2019.
Franck Ollu works intensively as a teacher, and maintains close ties with the International Ensemble Modern Academy, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London and the Paris Conservatoire.
