FRANKLIN, CHRISTOPHER

Born in San Francisco, the conductor Christopher Franklin studied at the University of Illinois and then, on a Fulbright Scholarship, at the Saarbrücken Conservatory, and at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. As a prize-winner in the Treviso La Bottega International Conductors Competition he served as assistant to Peter Maag in Treviso. He later worked with Seiji Ozawa, Bernard Haitink and Gustav Meier at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and with Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School of Music in the United States. His interest in opera brought him to the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, where he conducted Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia. At the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome he conducted the first performance of Cilea’s Gina (recorded for Bongiovanni) and a production of Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe. Other engagements followed at the Spontini Festival in Jesi, in Turin and, with a Mozart cycle, in Genoa.

He is the regular conductor for solo concerts by the tenor Juan Diego Flórez and has, among other orchestras, conducted the South West German Radio Orchestra Kaiserslauten in a tour of Germany. His repertoire ranges from Spontini (the modern première of Lalla Rukh), Mozart, Rossini and Verdi to Britten and Tutino. In addition to conducting L’amor coniugale in Bad Wildbad he has also conducted Rossini’s farce La cambiale di matrimonio and the première of the revival of La gazzetta in its complete form, including a new quintetto.

Albums featuring this artist are available for download from ClassicsOnline.com
MAYR: Amor coniugale (L')	8.660198-99