Daniele Gatti - Chief conductor
Daniele Gatti graduated as a composer and orchestra conductor at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan. He is Music Director of the Orchestra Mozart, Artistic Advisor of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. From 2024 he will be Chief Conductor of the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden.
He was Music Director of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and he previously held prestigious roles at important musical institutions like the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Royal Opera House of London, the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Zurich’s Opernhaus and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.
The Berliner Philharmoniker, the Wiener Philharmoniker, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, and the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala are just a few of the renowned symphonic institutions he works with.
Some of the numerous and important new productions he has conducted include Falstaff staged by Robert Carsen (in London, Milan, and Amsterdam); Parsifal staged by Stefan Herheim opening the 2008 Bayreuther Festspiele (one of the very few Italian conductors to have been invited to the Wagnerian festival); Parsifal staged by François Girard at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; four operas at the Salzburger Festspiele (Elektra, La bohème, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Il Trovatore).
To celebrate Verdi’s anniversary, in 2013 he conducted La Traviata at the season opening of the Teatro alla Scala, where he also opened the 2008 season with Don Carlo, and performed other titles including Lohengrin, Lulu, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Falstaff, and Wozzeck.
More recent engagements include Pelléas et Mélisande at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Tristan und Isolde at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the 2016/2017 opening of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma where he conducted the same Wagnerian opera.
Since 2016 he has taught conducting at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and in the same year a three-year concert cycle named “RCO meets Europe” started. It involved 28 member states of the European Union and it included the project “Side by Side”, a project allowing musicians from local youth orchestras to perform the first musical number of the program next to the members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Maestro Gatti, thus fostering an incredibly fruitful human and musical exchange. In June 2017 he conducted the RCO in an opera production: Salome at the Nationale Opera of Amsterdam.
The 2017/2018 Season saw him conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker at the Philharmonie Berlin, the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan interpreting Mahler’s Second Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Europe, South Korea, Japan, and at the Carnegie Hall in New York, all being side events to Amsterdam’s traditional season.
He opened several seasons of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma: La Damnation de Faust (2017-2018), Rigoletto (2018-2019), Les Vêpres Siciliennes (2019-2020), Il barbiere di Siviglia (2020-2021) and the world premiere of Battistelli’s Julius Caesar (2021-2022). He has recently conducted new productions of I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Zaide, La traviata (broadcasted on Rai3) and Giovanna d’Arco at the Teatro Costanzi; Rigoletto and Il trovatore at the Circo Massimo. He interpreted Verdi’s Requiem at the Palau de Les Arts in Valencia. He also conducted concerts leading the Orchestra dell’Opera di Roma at the Quirinale Gardens (broadcasted on Rai1), at the MAXXI Museum and at the Galleria Borghese.
In 2022, as part of the 84th Festival of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, he conducted Orphée et Eurydice – the inaugural title of the Festival – and Ariadne auf Naxos.
In 2022-2023 he conducts Il barbiere di Siviglia, the first title of the opera season 2022/23 of the Teatro del Maggio, and interprets the Quattro pezzi sacri at the Verdi Festival and at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino where he also conducts Don Carlo, The Rake’s Progress and Pulcinella.
For the 85th Festival of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino 2023 he conducts the opening concert, Falstaff, a concert with compositions by Giuseppe Verdi and all the Čajkovskij symphonies.
In summer 2025 he will return to the Bayreuth Festival for the new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
He regularly leads the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestra Mozart, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the Dresdner Festspielorchester, the Münchner Philharmoniker, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Daniele Gatti was awarded the Premio “Franco Abbiati” from Italian music critics as best conductor in 2015, in 2016 he was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the French Republic for his work as Music Director of the Orchestre National de France and he was also awarded the Grand Officer of Merit of the Italian Republic.
Under Sony Classical he has recorded works by Debussy and Stravinsky with the Orchestre National de France, and a DVD of Wagner’s Parsifal staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Under the label RCO Live he has recorded Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Mahler’s First, Second and Fourth Symphonies, a DVD of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps together with Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune and La Mer, a DVD of Strauss’s Salome performed at the Dutch National Opera, a CD of Bruckner’s Symphony n. 9 together with the Prelude and the Karfreitagszauber (Good Friday Music) from Wagner’s Parsifal. In November 2019 a DVD of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, staged at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, was released by C Major.