Teodor Currentzis

Teodor Currentzis has earned recognition as a conductor whose unconventional readings of opera have emerged from the out-of-the-way centers of Novosibirsk and Perm. The Guardian once described him as “the conducting equivalent of Glenn Gould morphed with Kurt Cobain.”

He entered the world in Athens on February 24, 1972, and took up both piano and violin during childhood. Recognized early as a prodigy, he enrolled at Greece’s National Conservatory at age twelve to study violin before shifting his focus to composition a few years afterward. In 1994 he relocated to Russia, where he trained in conducting under the nonagenarian Ilya Musin at the State Conservatory in St. Petersburg and completed the program in 1998. Currentzis has observed that Greece’s succession of military dictatorships, one of them active at the time of his birth, rendered a move to Russia unsurprising; once there, he became a symbol of intellectual liberty within progressive musical circles of his new homeland and acquired Russian citizenship.

While serving as music director of the Novosibirsk State Opera and Orchestra in 2004, he established MusicAeterna and assumed its artistic directorship, guiding both the choir and the ensemble in historically informed performances. Two years later he launched the Territoria Modern Art Festival in Moscow. He remained in Novosibirsk until 2010, at which point he took the artistic directorship of the Perm State Opera and Ballet Theater. The Golden Mask theatrical award came to him for stagings of Purcell’s The Indian Queen, Berg’s Wozzeck, Prokofiev’s Cinderella, and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. He continues to lead MusicAeterna and has brought new productions of Purcell’s The Indian Queen and additional Baroque operas to European stages. Growing visibility across western Europe led to his appointment in 2018 as chief conductor of the newly formed SWR Sinfonieorchester in Stuttgart, Germany.

Recordings on the Alpha label began in 2008 and encompass, among other projects, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14, Op. 135—one of his infrequent non-operatic discs. His Mozart interpretations, however, have generated the widest notice and drawn the interest of the multinational Sony label. Employing rapid tempi, vehement accents rooted in his Baroque-performance experience, and a multinational roster of singers chosen to match his pace, Currentzis has recorded a cycle of Mozart operas (Don Giovanni was captured in Perm in 2016) that has both energized and divided critical and public response. With the MusicAeterna Orchestra he has turned increasingly to instrumental repertory, releasing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 (“Pathétique”) in 2017, Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor in 2018, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 in 2020. The same year Alpha reissued his earlier account of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626.