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About
Benjamin Shwartz served as Music Director of the Orkiestra Symfoniczna NFM Wrocław, from 2013 to 2016. His tenure coincided with a move to a new state-of-the-art concert hall inaugurated in September 2015 and during Wrocław’s 2016 title of European Capital of Culture. As a guest conductor, he has been invited to work with orchestras like the Royal Stockholm, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gulbenkian, BBC Scotland, Tokyo, Iceland, Aarhus Symphony orchestras, as well as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Orchestre National de Lille.
Shwartz’s repertoire choices in Wrocław and the range of his work elsewhere reflect his anti-dogmatic, open-minded approach to programming, embracing everything from Adams’s Chamber Symphony to Mahler’s Symphony no. 4, Brahms’ Symphony no. 2 to Bartók’s ’Bluebeard’s Castle’.
Opera has been a mainstay in recent seasons. Shwartz did his Oper Köln debut in 2016 with Bernstein’s’Candide’. Earlier productions include ‘Die Fledermaus’ and ‘La bohème’ at the Royal Swedish Opera, Berlioz’s ‘Béatrice et Bénédict‘ at the Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar, Rossini’s ‘Il viaggio a Reims‘, Bellini’s ‘La sonnambula‘ and Gounod’s ‘Faust‘ at the Curtis Institute; more recently a choreographed production of ‘The Rite of Spring’ and Salonen’s Violin Concerto with the Orchestre de l’Opéra National de Paris.
Shwartz has performed with, among others, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Tokyo Symphony and the Göteborg Symphony orchestras, the Orquestra Gulbenkian and the Orchestre National de Lille.