Oleg Caetani made his Australian début in 2001 with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and in January 2005 took up the post of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director. He has a particularly close relationship with the Staatskapelle Dresden, which he has conducted for almost three decades, and the Giuseppe Verdi Orchestra in Milan, conducting the latter in 2008 in a concert presented by the Italian President to Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican and recorded live for Eurovision TV. His career has brought engagements at La Scala, Milan, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, in Berlin, and with the English National Opera, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, in San Francisco, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, in Seattle and Houston, and with orchestras throughout Europe and in Australia.

His three recordings for Chandos of music by Alexandre Tansman have won the Diapason d’Or. Nadia Boulanger discovered his talent and initiated him into music. At the Rome Conservatory of Santa Cecilia he attended Franco Ferrara’s conducting class and studied composition with Irma Ravinale, and at the age of seventeen made his theatre début with Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. He subsequently went to the Moscow Conservatory to study conducting with Kyrill Kondrashin and musicology with Nadezhda Nikolaev. He graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory in conducting with Ilya Musin.