JUN MÄRKL

Jun Märkl was music director of the Basque National Orchestra from 2014 to 2017, music director of the Orchestre national de Lyon from 2005 to 2011, and principal conductor/artistic advisor of the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony until 2012. In recognition of his tenure in Lyon and his very successful nine-disc Debussy cycle with the orchestra on Naxos [8.509002], in 2012 he was honoured by the French Ministry of Culture with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

He also toured with the orchestra to Japan and major European halls and festivals. He has appeared as a guest conductor with leading orchestras in the United States, Europe and Japan, and at the Met, Covent Garden, Vienna State and Dresden Semper Operas. He also enjoys a close relationship with the NHK Symphony with which he conducted the first Japanese Ring cycle in Tokyo, and has performed and given premieres of many of Toshio Hosokawa’s works, including Lotus under the moonlight with Momo Kodama in 2006.

Born in Munich to a German father, a distinguished concertmaster, and a Japanese mother, a solo pianist, Märkl studied violin, piano and conducting at the Musikhochschule in Hanover, going on to study with Sergiu Celibidache in Munich and with Gustav Meier in Michigan. In 1986 he won the conducting competition of the Deutsche Musikrat and a year later won a scholarship from the Boston Symphony Orchestra to study at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. Soon afterwards he had a string of appointments in European opera houses followed by his first music directorships at the Staatstheater in Saarbrücken (1991–94) and at the Mannheim Nationaltheater (1994–2000).

Jun Märkl has long been a highly respected interpreter of the core Germanic repertoire from both the symphonic and operatic traditions, and, more recently, for his refined and idiomatic performances of the music of Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen. He is Invited Professor at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo. www.junmarkl.com

For more information, visit www.junmarkl.com.

A MAN OF THE WORLD – Jeremy Siepmann talks to the conductor Jun Märkl

Role: Conductor
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