Marko Letonja previously served as Chief Conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg from 2012 to 2021, a tenure that featured collaborations with renowned artists such as Isabelle Faust, Stephen Hough, Nemanja Radulović, and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. His recent recording with the orchestra and vocalist Michael Spyres, entitled Baritenor, quickly amassed critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 10 classical albums of 2021 by The Times and winning the 2022 Gramophone Award for Vocal Album of the Year. He was also awarded the Helpmann Award for Best Symphony Orchestra Concert for a concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton.
Letonja has been invited to guest conduct a number of the world’s most prestigous orchestras, including the Vienna Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Hamburg Symphony, Salzburg Mozarteum, Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, and the Berlin Radio Symphony. He has previously held further titled positions, including Chief Conductor of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor of Sinfonieorchester Basel and the Theater Basel, where he recorded a complete cycle of symphonies by Felix Weingartner and conducted new productions of Tannhäuser, La traviata, Der Freischütz, Boris Godunov, Tristan und Isolde, Rigoletto, and Don Giovanni. An avid enthusiast of the music of Wagner, he has also conducted the Ring cycle at both the Royal Swedish Opera and Teatro Saõ Carlos in Lisbon, as well as productions of Parsifal, Die Walküre, and Götterdämmerung at the Opéra National du Rhin.
Previously, Letonja has also conducted at the Vienna State Opera (The Queen of Spades, Les contes d’Hoffmann), the Grand Théâtre of Geneva (Medea, Manon), the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome (Roméo et Juliette), the Semperoper in Dresden (Nabucco), Teatro alla Scala in Milan (Il dissoluto assolto by José Samarago in combination with Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna; The Makropulos Case, Les contes d’Hoffmann), the Staatsoper Berlin (Madama Butterfly), the Deutsche Oper Berlin (La traviata), the Opéra National du Rhin (Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung, Der fliegender Holländer, The Makropulos Case, The Queen of Spades), and at the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari (Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Der fliegende Holländer).
Marko Letonja began his studies as a pianist and conductor at the Music Academy of Ljubljana and graduated as a student of Otmar Suitner at the Academy of Music and Theatre in Vienna in 1989. Only two years later he became Music Director of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra in Ljubljana, which he conducted until 2003. He makes his Hungarian State Opera debut in 2025 with Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (Symphony of a Thousand).