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Conductor Laureate
Kazushi Ono

Described as “one of the most fascinating musical minds of our era” and “a phenomenon” (Le Figaro), Japanese conductor Kazushi Ono has held the position of Principal Conductor of Opéra de Lyon since the start of the 2008/09 season and is also Conductor Laureate of Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini. He is Music Director designate of Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, a position he will assume in April 2015, and will also take over the musical leadership of the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya from September 2015.

High profile positions have played an important part in Kazushi Ono’s career to date: in 2002 he succeeded Antonio Pappano as Music Director of Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels and it was here that his debut production of Strauss's Elektra was described by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as “the miracle of Brussels”. Kazushi Ono enjoyed six highly successful seasons at La Monnaie before moving to his current position at Opéra de Lyon.

During his tenure in Lyon, new, award-winning and critically-acclaimed productions, most notably Prokofiev’s The Gambler, Berg’s Lulu, Stravinsky’s Le rossignol et autres fables, Verdi’s Luisa Miller, Shostakovich’s The Nose and Wagner’s Parsifal have been staged. During the 2012/13 season, Kazushi Ono conducted new productions of Verdi’s Macbeth, a double bill featuring Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero and Schönberg’s Erwartung and Beethoven’s Fidelio which he also conducted when Opéra de Lyon performed at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2013. Productions Kazushi Ono conducted during the 2013/14 season include Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (also on tour in Japan) and Britten’s Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw. In the 2014/15 season he will conduct new productions of Der fliegende Holländer and Pelléas et Mélisande and A Midsummer’s Night Dream on tour at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

Kazushi Ono enjoys relationships with many of the world’s top opera houses and has appeared as a guest conductor at Glyndebourne Festival Opera (L'heure espagnole, L’enfant et les sortilèges and Hänsel und Gretel), Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich (Der fliegende Holländer and Hänsel und Gretel), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (Le rossignol), Deutsche Oper, Berlin (Elektra), Teatro alla Scala, Milan (Macbeth), The Metropolitan Opera, New York (Der fliegende Holländer) and Opéra national de Paris (Król Roger). He has a strong affection for the theatre and works not only with established opera directors such as Luc Bondy, Peter Stein, Laurent Pelly and David McVicar, but has also enjoyed collaborations with artists outside the traditional opera field such as the visual artist Jan Fabre, choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and film director François Girard.

Kazushi Ono is a guest conductor with some of the leading international orchestras, including City of Birmingham Symphony, Boston Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

A Grammy 2012 award winner (‘Diva Divo’: Joyce DiDonato with Orchestre de l'Opéra de Lyon), Kazushi Ono’s varied catalogue of CD recordings demonstrates his wide repertoire, ranging from Chin (Deutsche Grammophon), Gubaidulina, Britten, Turnage and Rihm to Shostakovich, Mahler, Strauss and Tchaikovsky. A DVD of the highly successful 2012 production of the Ravel double bill L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges at Glyndebourne was released in August 2013 and was the winner of the Gramophone Award 2014 for best Opera Recording. Other recent recordings include a 2009 Decca DVD of the acclaimed production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel filmed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Glyndebourne as well as releases from the Opus Arte label featuring productions of Verdi’s Aida and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, both with La Monnaie, Brussels.

(Curriculum Vitae as of April 2015)