CHRISTIAN BADEA – Symphony and Opera Conductor
Christian Badea has received exceptional acclaim throughout his worldwide career, which encompasses prestigious engagements in the foremost concert halls and opera theaters on all the continents.
At the Metropolitan Opera in New York he conducted over 160 performances in a wide variety of repertoire, including many of the MET international broadcasts.
Among the opera theaters where Christian Badea was invited multiple times, are the Wiener Staatsoper , the Royal Opera House of Covent Garden in London, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Sydney Opera, the Grand Theatre in Geneva, the Theatre Royal de La Monnaie in Brussels, the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, the Royal Opera theaters in Copenhagen and Stockholm, the Oslo Opera, the Teatro Regio in Torino and the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, the Opera National de Lyon and in North America – the opera companies of Houston, Dallas, Toronto, Montreal and Detroit.
Christian Badea has collaborated with most of the important singers of the last 30 years – such as Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Alfredo Krauss, Mirella Freni, Christa Ludwig, Giuseppe Giaccomini, Bryn Terfel, Renee Fleming, Thomas Hampson, Leo Nucci, Stefan Vinke , Natalie Dessay, Rolando Vilazon, among many others and with important stage directors such as Franco Zeffirelli, Werner Herzog, Bruce Beresford, Stefan Herheim, John Cox, David Pountney and Keith Warner, to name just a few.
Equally dividing his time between symphony and opera conductIng, Christian Badea has appeared as a frequent guest with important orchestras in concert halls such as Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw, Suntory Hall or Salle Pleyel in Paris.
Christian Badea was a guest of such orchestras as the Royal Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony in London, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, the Sankt Petersburg Philharmonic in Russia, the National Orchestra of Spain, the Orchestre Philharmonique in Paris, the Czech Philharmonic, the Tokyo Philharmonic and many others, collaborating with major artists as Leonard Bernstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, YoYo Ma, Yefim Bronfman, Shlomo Mintz, Midori, Cho Liang Lin, Mitsuko Uchida, Mischa Maisky, Viktor Tretyakov and many others.
His discography includes the Saint Saens Symphony no.3 with the Royal Philharmonic on the Telarc label, award winning recordings of symphonies of American composers Roger Sessions and Peter Mennin, as well as a live recording of Samuel Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra, which won a Grammy Award.
Christian Badea received his initial training as a violinist and he studied conducting in Brussels and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with Herbert von Karajan. He graduated from the Juilliard School. One of his most important mentors in New York was Leonard Bernstein.
In 2012 Christian Badea became the Principal Conductor of the Bucharest “George Enescu” Philharmonic and in the same year he established the Romanian Foundation for Excellence in Music, dedicated to creating international artistic projects of the highest artistic value and helping the development of the best young musicians from Romania and other European countries. .
Among the projects realized by the Foundation are the Sibiu- Hermannstadt International Music Festival , the “The Parsifal Project “, presented in 2015 and in 2016 at the Romanian Athenaeum and the “Great Concerts of the Romanian Centennial” cycle , in collaboration with the “George Enescu” Philharmonic, in 2018.
His recent debut with “Andrea Chenier” at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, was a great success and he was immediately invited to return in 2019 for a production of “Turandot”. His artistic partnership with the Sydney Opera started in 2011, will continue well into 2020 and he will be returning for concerts in Spain and to the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest, conducting the Sankt Petersburg Philharmonic with Vadim Repin as soloist.
