The star conductor Teodor Currentzis

Description

Teodor Currentzis is one of the most fascinating and at the same time most controversial conductors of our time. Critics have recently spoken of the musician's "shameless ego trip" and labelled him a "cult leader" or "egomaniac", for example during his performances at the Salzburg Festival last summer. His followers, on the other hand, worship Currentzis like a guru and travel hundreds of kilometres to see one of his concerts. In any case, the conductor manages to remain a talking point and constantly provides the public and feature pages with new fodder for debate.

The career of Teodor Currentzis, born in Athens in 1972 and known to all as Teo, is one of the most unusual in recent music history. As a young man, he moved to St Petersburg to study with the conducting legend Ilya Musin. He then worked in Novosibirsk and Perm in the Urals, where he lived with his musicians like a "patchwork family" and spent years forming his ensemble MusicAeterna, as well as founding the New Siberian Singers' Chamber Choir and, in 2018, MusicAeterna Byzantina. Currentzis, who detests the traditional conductor's tailcoat and likes to have his strings play standing up, does not shy away from the "evergreens" of classical music, but gives Beethoven's 5th Symphony, for example, such unusual tempi and dynamics that the old warhorse sounds fresh and unheard of again.

The man from Perm was soon seen as a beacon of hope in a classical music business that had become rigid in its routines and liked to present himself as a rebel who wanted to shake up the scene.
He became really famous in the decade when he first recorded Mozart's "Requiem" and then the Da Ponte opera cycle on disc.Currentzis has also been chief conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra since 2019.Over the years, a Currentzis cult has developed, ensuring that the musician is able to perform regularly at all the premier concert halls and major festivals, where he is almost ritually acclaimed. MusicAeterna by no means relies solely on the "crowd pleasers" of the classical tradition, but also has a considerable proportion of contemporary music, often world premieres, in its repertoire.The Currentzis organisation now lives and works in St. Petersburg and works on perfecting the MusicAeterna sound and expanding the repertoire on the premises of "Dom Radio" - rehearsal times are not measured in minutes and hours, but in results.
The fact that Teodor Currentzis does not suffer from a lack of self-confidence is clear from a sentence he dictated to a British journalist after a few drinks, but later toned down again: "Give me five or ten years and I will save classical music."