Oleg Ptashnikov was born in Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk) in Ukraine. He graduated from his studies at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music in Moscow with Oleg Boshniakovich and Natalia Gulyanitskaya in 1995 with a diploma as a concert pianist and a further diploma in musicology. While still a student he worked as a répétiteur, conductor, arranger and composer at various Moscow theatres. He subsequently moved to Germany, where he undertook postgraduate studies in piano at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich with Olaf Dreßler, and in orchestral conducting at the University of Music Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden with Ekkehard Klemm.
Since the 2002/03 season Oleg Ptashnikov has been Kapellmeister at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich. There he has conducted more than 500 performances in more than seventy diverse productions, ranging in repertory from Mozart to Henze. As a guest conductor he has worked with orchestras including the Munich Radio Orchestra, the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid.
From 2014 to 2019 Oleg Ptashnikov was musical assistant to Mariss Jansons, including on the Salzburg Festival productions of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades.
