CHARLES DUTOITMusic Director
Throughout a career that has energetically spanned the globe and mined the riches of orchestral repertoire, Charles Dutoit has exhibited a passion for excellence and insatiable discovery. Since his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1981, he is invited each season to conduct all the major orchestras in the United States, including those of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Cleveland. He has also performed regularly with all the great orchestras of Europe, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the Vienna Philharmonic, with all the London orchestras as well as the Israel Philharmonic and all the major orchestras of Japan, South America and Australia. Charles Dutoit has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, CBS, Erato and other labels with many American, European and Japanese orchestras. More than 170 recordings, half of them with the Montreal Symphony, garnered more than 60 awards and distinctions around the world. For 25 years (1977 to 2002), Charles Dutoit was Artistic Director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, a dynamic musical partnership recognized the world over. Since 1990, he has been Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra's summer concert series at the Saratoga Festival of the Performing Arts in upstate New York. Between 1990 and 1999, he also directed the orchestra's summer series at the Mann Music Center in Philadelphia, and led them in a series of distinctive recordings. From 1991 to 2001, Charles Dutoit was Music Director of the Orchestre National de France with whom he made a number of critically lauded recordings and toured extensively on the five continents. In 1996, Charles Dutoit was appointed Principal Conductor and Music Director of the NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo) with whom he has toured Europe 3 times, the United States, China and Southeast Asia. When still in his early 20's, Charles Dutoit was invited by Von Karajan to conduct at the Vienna State Opera. Since then, he has regularly conducted at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He also conducted a highly acclaimed new stage production of Berlioz's masterpiece Les Troyens at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera. In 2003, he started to conduct a cycle of Wagner's operas, The Flying Dutchman and the complete Ring Cycle at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.
He has also given several masterclasses at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and annual courses in conducting in Japan and in Buenos Aires. He was Artistic Director of the Sapporo Pacific Music Festival for three seasons and is now Artistic Director of the Miyazaki International Music Festival in Japan. He has made ten documentary films for NHK Television in Japan for a series entitled Cities of Music featuring ten musical capitals of the world. A globetrotter motivated by his passion for history, political science, ethnology, arhitecture and visual arts, Charles Dutoit has traveled and visited 170 countries. He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and his extensive musical training included violin, viola, piano, percussion, history of music and composition at the Conservatoires and Music Academies of Geneva, Siena, Venice and Boston. He keeps residences in Switzerland, Paris, Montreal, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.
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