Oleg Caetani

Conductor Oleg Caetani, one of the final pupils of Nadia Boulanger, has maintained a balanced presence across both operatic and symphonic domains. His professional path reflects repeated shifts between different institutions and ensembles.

Born on October 5, 1956, in Lausanne, Switzerland, Caetani experienced a cosmopolitan childhood shaped by his father, conductor Igor Markevitch, and his Italian mother, Donna Topazia Caetani. French served as his initial language in Lausanne, yet childhood visits to his mother’s relatives in Brighton enabled fluent command of English alongside Russian, German, and Italian. He adopted the Caetani surname to extend his maternal line, which traces back to a Roman family that produced Pope Boniface VIII in the fourteenth century. At age nine he encountered Boulanger and attended her summer courses at the Fontainebleau academy, where she exerted lasting influence. His schooling took place in the Pyrenees and in Nice before he entered the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome; at seventeen he conducted his first performance, Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. Further training followed with Franco Ferrara, then at the Moscow Conservatory under Kirill Kondrashin and later with Ilya Musin, culminating in graduation from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1979 he claimed first prize in Italy’s RAI Competition.

His principal operatic debut occurred two years later at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in what was then East Berlin. He served as assistant to Otmar Suitner while holding positions at the Nationaltheater Weimar, as First Kapellmeister at the Frankfurt Opera, and with the Robert Schumann-Philharmonie in Chemnitz. The year 1987 marked his first commercial recording, leading the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 44. During that era Caetani numbered among the few musicians able to travel and work successfully on both sides of the intra-German border. Appointed music director of the English National Opera in 2002, he maintained frequent guest appearances there after relinquishing the post.

Between 2005 and 2010 he served as music director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He nevertheless told Opera magazine, “I see my job as a luxury. I don’t believe I should have to make sacrifices for the sake of a career, but I do believe I have to enjoy my music and work hard on it. So when I hear that I should make this or that move in my career, or conduct an orchestra or a work I don’t like, in order to reach the next point in the strategy, it means nothing to me.” Consequently he has functioned chiefly as a guest conductor and recording artist, releasing discs with ensembles that include the Melbourne Symphony, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi—on which he completed a full cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies—and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, whose 2014 sessions yielded a set of Gounod symphonies. In 2022 he reappeared as accompanist to violinist Charlie Siem on a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, with the Philharmonia Orchestra.