Riccardo Chailly

Riccardo Chailly is Music Director of Teatro alla Scala and Principal Conductor of Filarmonica della Scala. He has been Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the oldest orchestra in Europe, and he guided the Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 16 years as Principal Conductor.
He is Music Director of the Lucerna Festival’s Orchestra, a position held by Claudio Abbado in the past.
He regularly conducts the most important European and US-American symphonic orchestras, including the Wiener Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is regularly invited to festivals such as Salzburg Festival and London’s BBC Proms. 

His career as opera conductor includes productions at Teatro alla Scala, Wiener Staatsoper, New York Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, London Covent Garden, Bayerische Staatsoper and Opernhaus Zurich. He is a Grand Officer of the Republic of Italy and a member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1998 he was made Knight Grand Cross of the Republic of Italy; in the same year, the Queen of the Netherlands vested him with the title Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. In 2011 he was appointed Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand.
 
Riccardo Chailly is a Decca exclusive artist. He has been honoured for his more than 150 CDs with many prizes, including the ECHO Klassik in 2012 and 2015. Among the most recent prizes is the Gramophone Award as Recording of the Year for the complete edition of Brahms’ Symphonies. His recording activities with Filarmonica della Scala, renewed in 2013 with “Viva Verdi” for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Verdi’s birthday, includes a CD released in 2017 with “Overtures, Preludes & Intermezzi” from operas that had their first representation at Teatro alla Scala. In 2019 the label published The Fellini Album with film music by Nino Rota. The latest releases are “Cherubini Discoveries” (2020), “Respighi” (2020) and “Musa Italiana” (2021).