The British conductor Leo Hussain has established himself in recent years above all with his interpretations of Mozart, and of 20th-century works and compositions by the Second Viennese School. He has been music director of the Opéra de Rouen Normandie and of the Salzburg Landestheater, and works regularly at leading opera houses and with international orchestras.
Highlights of the 2023/24 season included Don Carlo at the Hamburg State Opera, Salome at the Frankfurt Opera, Death in Venice at the Welsh National Opera and Pelléas et Mélisande at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse. In the 2022/23 season his opera conducting engagements included Tosca at the English National Opera, Tristan und Isolde at the Opéra national de Lorraine and Falstaff in Hamburg.
He made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2016 with Enescu’s Oedipe and has returned there for Die Zauberflöte. His other opera engagements have included Cimarosa’s L’italiana in Londra at the Frankfurt Opera, Capriccio at the Santa Fe Opera, Carmen at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, Lakmé (in concert) at the Teatro Real, Madrid, Thaïs, Der Waffenschmied and Salome at the Theater an der Wien, Wozzeck and Die tote Stadt in Toulouse and The Rape of Lucretia with Glyndebourne Festival Opera. He has a long-standing close relationship with the George Enescu Festival, where he most recently conducted Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder and a concert performance of Wozzeck.
His collaborations with Daniel Barenboim, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, and with Valery Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival, led to his symphonic debuts worldwide. Since then, he has conducted orchestras including the Bamberg, Hamburg and Vienna Symphony Orchestras, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Kammerakademie Potsdam, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the Orquestra Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Royal Danish Orchestra and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo.
Leo Hussain studied at the University of Cambridge and at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
