Petr Popelka is celebrated for his captivating and authentic approach to conducting. Since the 2024/25 season he has been chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Until the end of the 2025/26 season the Czech conductor was also chief conductor and artistic director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. From 2020 to 2023 he was chief conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra in Oslo. From the 2029/30 season he will be general music director of the Bavarian State Opera.
The Vienna Symphony Orchestra’s focus in the 2025/26 season has been celebrations of the orchestra’s 125th anniversary, which began with a gala concert, and a subsequent European tour. A tour of Asia followed early in 2026. Alongside a variety of performances at the Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein, the orchestra and Popelka continued their successful festival Primavera da Vienna in Trieste. Other highlights of the season for Popelka have included his debuts with the Berlin and Munich Philharmonics and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, his returns to the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Chicago and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras and the Cleveland Orchestra, and a festival tour with the Czech Philharmonic. An acclaimed opera conductor, he conducted a new production of Die Fledermaus at the MusikTheater an der Wien to celebrate Johann Strauss Year in 2025, and has also conducted Tosca at the Berlin State Opera and Rusalka at the 2026 Munich Opera Festival.
He has appeared as a guest conductor at the Zurich Opera House with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the Bavarian State Opera with Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the Semperoper Dresden with Shostakovich’s The Nose and the MusikTheater an der Wien with Weinberger’s Schwanda, among others, and has worked with orchestras including the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Bamberg Symphony, the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich, the Swedish and Danish Radio Symphony Orchestras and the NHK Symphony Orchestra. He has also participated in major television gala concerts, including a concert given by the Czech Philharmonic to commemorate the Velvet Revolution, and the 2024 Nobel Prize Concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.
Petr Popelka received his musical training in his home city of Prague and in Freiburg. He began his conducting career in 2019, after having been deputy principal double bassist in the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden from 2010 to 2019.
