Kirill Petrenko, chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker since August 2019, was born in the Siberian city of Omsk in 1972. At the age of 18, he moved with his family to Vorarlberg in Austria. Following his training as a conductor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, he worked from 1997 as an assistant and conductor at the city’s Volksoper; afterwards he was music director at the Meininger Theater from 1999 to 2002.

In 2001, he first attracted international attention when he conducted Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the production of Christine Mielitz with designs by Alfred Hrdlicka. From 2002 to 2007, Kirill Petrenko was general music director of the Komische Oper Berlin. He has also appeared at the state opera houses in Munich and Vienna, the Semperoper Dresden, the Royal Opera House in London, the Metropolitan Opera New York, the Opéra Bastille in Paris, and the Maggio Musicale Florenz and the Salzburg Festival. From 2013 to 2015, he conducted a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.

In the autumn of 2013, Kirill Petrenko took up his post as general music director of the Bayerische Staatsoper, which he held until the end of the 2019/20 season. On the concert stage, he has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin and Dresden Staatskapelle, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Kirill Petrenko made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in February 2006 with compositions by Bartók and Rachmaninov. In 2015, the orchestra elected him its chief conductor.