INTERVIEW
What do you do before a performance? Sleep, eat a banana, and if it feels necessary – drink coffee.
If you could play another instrument what would it be? Piano, singing.
The most inspiring composer: The one? Schumann, Wagner, Bach, Monteverdi, Schönberg, Sibelius…
How do you spend your free time? Reading, skiing, hiking.
What’s the last book you read? Prokofiev Diaries.
BIOGRAPHY
Philipp von Steinaecker was the first recipient of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s Melgaard Young Conductor position. Since then he has had broad experience as a guest conductor with many orchestras. Equally at home in the German romantic repertoire as in the works of the Second Viennese School, his passion and profound stylistic understanding for the music of the baroque and classical periods led him to found his own period instrument orchestra Musica Saeculorum.
Originally trained as a cellist, he worked extensively with Sir John Eliot Gardiner in the Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique and with Claudio Abbado, first as a founding member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and at the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and later as his assistant and as a guest conductor of his Orchestra Mozart. Both conductors have been an important inspiration to him and have had a strong influence on his musical development.
He has collaborated with many leading instrumental soloists and singers, including Camilla Tilling, Dorothea Röschmann, Isabelle Faust, Guy Braunstein, Daniel Müller-Schott, Fazil Say, Sara Mingardo, Andrew Staples, Mia Person, Hanno Müller Brachmann, Peter Harvey and Boris Belkin.
Recent highlights include return engagements with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Slovenian Philharmonic and debuts with the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Fondazione Toscanini di Parma, Residentie Hague Philharmonic and Prague Philharmonia. He has conducted critically acclaimed productions of Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Teatro Filarmonico di Verona and Gounod’s La Colombe at the Chigiana in Siena and in 2017-18 he will appear at the Paris Phillharmonie in a production of Haendel’s Giulio Cesare. Other highlights have included engagements with the Orchestra Mozart (Bologna), Camerata Salzburg, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Orchestra della Toscana, Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano and the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra.
With Musica Saeculourm he has appeared at the Cologne Philharmonie, the Internationale Barocktage Stift Melk in Austria, the Festival des Pâques d’Aix-en-Provence and the Philharmonie Essen. The group has already an impressive discography including recordings of Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation (nominated for International Classic Music Award 2015), Bruckner’s Symphony N.1, Bruckner’s Motets, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and a CD with arrangements for Salon Orchestra. A new CD with Camilla Tilling featuring arias by Mozart and Gluck was released on the Swedish label BIS in February 2017.