Biography

Karina Canellakis is Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Berlin Radio Symphony. Her 2021–22 season includes debuts with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, and the HR-Sinfonieorchester, and return engagements with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Orchestre de Paris. Last summer, she made debuts with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Festival, and the Orchestre National de France at the St. Denis Festival. On the opera stage, she conducts a new production of Eugene Onegin at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, with Orchestre National de France. She enjoys conducting opera-in-concert performances and will lead the Netherlands Radio Orchestra at the Concertgebouw for Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová, the second act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and the Vienna Symphony at the Bregenz Festival in the third act of Siegfried.

Since winning the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award in 2016, Ms. Canellakis has guest conducted leading orchestras around the world. She was the first woman to conduct the First Night of the BBC Proms in London in 2019, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and also the first woman to ever conduct the Nobel Prize Concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in 2018. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2019. Born in New York, she began her musical career as a violinist, and was initially encouraged to pursue conducting by Simon Rattle while playing regularly in the Berlin Philharmonic as a member of their Orchester-Akademie.