Christian Badea | FGE
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Christian Badea

First Principal Conductor

Christian Badea 3 credit Virgil Oprina _small_edited.jpg

Christian Badea has received exceptional acclaim throughout his extensive international career, which includes important collaborations in the most famous concert and opera halls on all continents.

At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he conducted more than 160 performances in a vast repertoire, including many of the MET's international broadcasts.

Among the opera houses where Christian Badea has been invited repeatedly are the Wiener Staatsoper, the Royal Opera Covent Garden in London, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Sydney Opera House, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie Bruxelles, the Amsterdam Opera House, the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen, Royal Opera in Stockholm, Opera in Oslo, Teatro Reggio in Turin, Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Opera National de Lyon, and in North America – opera companies in Houston, Dallas, Toronto, Montreal and Detroit.

Christian Badea has collaborated with some of the most important singers of the last 30 years, such as Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Alfredo Kraus, Mirella Freni, Christa Ludwig, Giuseppe Giaccomini, Bryn Terfel, Renée Fleming, Thomas Hampson, Leo Nucci, Stefan Vinke , Natalie Dessay, Rolando Vilazon and many others and with renowned directors, among whom we mention  Franco Zeffirelli, Werner Herzog, Bruce Beresford, Stefan Herheim, John Cox, David Pountney, Keith Warner and Andrei Sloppy

Equally dedicated to symphonic music, Christian Badea was at the lectern of many important orchestras in famous concert halls, such as Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw, Suntory Hall and Salle Pleyel in Paris.

 In a vast repertoire, which stretches from Bach and Mozart to the most important creations of the 20th century and of today's composers, Christian Badea has conducted orchestras such as the Royal Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony in London, Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome, Philharmonic of Saint Petersburg, National Orchestra of Spain, Orchester Philharmonique of Paris, Czech Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic and many others, collaborating with major artists such as Leonard Bernstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, YoYo Ma, Yefim Bronfman, Shlomo Mintz , Midori, Cho Liang Lin, Mitsuko Uchida, Mischa Maisky, Viktor Tretyakov and many others.

The discography of conductor Christian Badea includes, among others, Symphony no. 3 by Camille Saint-Saëns, recorded with the Royal Philharmonic on the Telarc label, acclaimed and award-winning recordings of symphonies by American composers Roger Sessions and Peter Mennin, and a live recording of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which received Grammy Award.

Christian Badea's career began as a violinist in Bucharest, where he studied with Ștefan Gheorghiu, then followed conducting courses in Brussels and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, with Herbert von Karajan. He graduated from the Juilliard School in New York, where one of his most important mentors was Leonard Bernstein.

In 2012, Christian Badea became the principal conductor of the "George Enescu" Philharmonic in Bucharest and, in the same year, established the Romanian Foundation for Excellence in Music, dedicated to the realization of artistic projects of the highest international artistic value and supporting the artistic development of those more talented young musicians from Romania and other European countries.

 Among the projects carried out by the Foundation are the Sibiu-Hermannstadt International Music Festival in 2014, the "Parsifal at the University" Project, presented in 2015 and 2016, and the "Great Concerts of the Centenary of Romania" cycle, in collaboration with the "George Enescu" Philharmonic, in the fall of 2018.

 

After a resounding success in his debut with Andrea Chénier's opera at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Christian Badea was immediately invited to return in 2019 for a new staging of Turandot. His artistic partnership with the Sydney Opera House, which began in 2011, continues with engagements until the 2020-21 season. In the symphonic field, Christian Badea returns to Spain and to the "George Enescu" Festival 2019 in Bucharest, to conduct the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic with Vadim Repin as soloist.

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