Sylvain Cambreling

The French-born conductor Sylvain Cambreling is an honorary member and principal guest conductor emeritus of Klangforum Wien and is well known as a master interpreter of contemporary music.
Since 2018 he has been chief conductor of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra — and has extended his contract until 2028. From 2010 to 2019 he conducted the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, and from 2012 to 2018 he was general music director of the Stuttgart State Opera. In 1993, following a decade as music director of La Monnaie in Brussels, he took up the same post at the Frankfurt Opera. During his tenures both Frankfurt and Stuttgart were named Opera House of the Year by the magazine Opernwelt.
Guest engagements have taken him to the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Milan, the English National Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and, regularly, to the Paris Opéra. At the Salzburg Festival he has conducted works including La Damnation de Faust, Le nozze di Figaro, Pelléas et Mélisande and Les Troyens.

He has worked with numerous prestigious orchestras, among them the Vienna, Berlin and Munich Philharmonics, the Orchestre de Paris, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Oslo Philharmonic. In North America, he has conducted the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.
A great believer in imaginative programming, Sylvain Cambreling is famed for the originality of his concert planning, juxtaposing contrasting but related works or composers, including Haydn and Messiaen or Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust and Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust.
With the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, of which he was chief conductor from 1999 to 2011, he recorded Messiaen’s complete orchestral works, for which he was awarded the ECHO Klassik as Conductor of the Year and the German Record Critics’ Award in 2009, and the MIDEM Contemporary Music Award in 2010. To mark his 75th birthday, a ten-CD box documenting his entire work with the SWR Symphony Orchestra was released in 2023. Sylvain Cambreling has been honoured with numerous awards, among them the rank of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2007, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2012.
In 2009 Sylvain Cambreling won the Echo Klassik Award for conductor of the year and the German Record Critics’ Prize for best orchestral CD. The following year he won the MIDEM Contemporary Music Award for his recording of works by Messiaen with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Freiburg and Baden-Baden. In 2012 he was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.