Fabrice Bollon

 

Bollon is an internationally acclaimed and versatile conductor. He studied with Michael Gielen and Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Paris and at Salzburg’s Mozarteum before completing his studies with Georges Prêtre and Mauricio Kagel.


He worked as musical assistant at Salzburg Festival until 1998, was deputy musical director at Germany’s Oper Chemnitz (from 2000 till 2004) and chief conductor of the Flanders’ Symphony Orchestra (from 1996 till 2000), so he had the chance to cover a broad repertory. First guest engagements included Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, Orchestre philharmonique de Monte Carlo, Strasbourg, Orchestra Nazionale della RAI, MDR Symphony Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Residentie Orkest, hr-Sinfonieorchester and Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern among others.


From 2009 he has been General Music Diretor/Chief conductor at Germany’s Theater Freiburg, and there the orchestra and the opera division have made an enormous step under his guidance: box office records, a very high acceptance of the orchestra, the programmes and the opera titles within the city and region and an increase of the orchestra size. In September 2016 Bollon was unanimously re-elected for another mandate and started a cooperation with international CD label Naxos which will include CD as well as DVDs of operas and concerts with his orchestra. His work in Freiburg has been acclaimed internationally aswell: several guest performances of the theater, among them in the UK (with Wagner’s Parsifal and Tannhäuser) and the already released CDs (with either cpo or Naxos) won many prizes (2015: Diapason d’Or and a Grammophone Editor’s Choice for Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini as well as an Editor’s Choice for Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba in 2017 among others). Since 2010 he got several nominations as “conductor of the year”, as “orchestra of the year”, “best concert programme”, best rediscovered opera (Wolf-Ferrari’s I Gioielli della Madonna in 2016) by German critics.


Fabrice Bollon also regularly appears abroad, among others at Moscow’s Stanislavsky Theater (with R. Wagner’s Tannhäuser), at the Hungarian State Opera Budapest (Verdi’s Aida), the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, the Slovene Radio Orchestra Ljubljana and in Hungary, Japan, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and Monte Carlo.

Besides Fabrice Bollon is an acclaimed composer. His works are published by Edition Peters and performed by Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, MDR Sinfonieorchester and Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saabrücken Kaiserslautern among other orchestras. His opera “Oscar und die Dame in Rosa” which he wrote for Theater Freiburg was highly acclaimed by both critics and audiences.