Kirill Petrenko has been chief conductor and artistic director of the Berliner Philharmoniker since the 2019/20 season. He was general music director of the Bavarian State Opera from 2013 to 2020, following posts at the Vienna Volksoper, the Meiningen State Theatre and the Komische Oper Berlin during the earlier part of his career. He has also appeared as a guest conductor at venues such as the Vienna State Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the Paris Opéra and the Salzburg Festival. From 2013 to 2015 he conducted Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.
Since his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2006, he has developed a number of programming priorities in his work with the orchestra. These include a continued focus on the orchestra’s core Classical-Romantic repertory, epitomized in his inaugural performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Another of Kirill Petrenko’s priorities is exploring unfairly neglected composers such as Josef Suk, Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Recent acclaimed opera appearances with the Berliner Philharmoniker have included Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Richard Wagner‘s Rheingold.
He continued his programming policies with the Berliner Philharmoniker in the 2025/26 season, which featured works including Beethoven’s Second Symphony and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Janáček’s Lachian Dances, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and compositions by Respighi, Bartók, Zimmermann and Dusapin. He and the orchestra celebrated their return to the Salzburg Easter Festival with Wagner’s Das Rheingold.
He has made guest appearances with the world’s most prestigious orchestras, among them the Vienna Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Israel Philharmonic.
Through his direction of projects for the Karajan Academy and concerts with the National Youth Orchestra of Germany as well as the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, he is committed to the education of young musicians and to teaching various aspects of music to young people.
Born in Omsk (Siberia), Kirill Petrenko received his training first in his home town and later in Austria.
