The Austrian conductor Christian Pollack was born in Vienna and studied violin, viola, piano and composition at the conservatory and musikhochschule there. He had his training as a conductor with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna and Sergiu Celibidache in Munich. His début was in 1971 at the theatre of Regensburg, followed by further appointments in Aachen, Klagenfurt, Vienna, Lucerne and the Bregenz Festival. He has appeared as a guest-conductor with the Baden-Baden Radio Orchestra, and in the opera houses of Nuremberg, Essen and Vienna (Volksoper). Since 1995 he has been musical director of the opera class at the Vienna Conservatory Privat-University and since September 2002 principal guest conductor of the Žilina Chamber Orchestra in Slovakia. For the Naxos and Marco Polo labels he has made a number of recordings of classical Viennese music, notably the works of the Strauss family, Ziehrer, Suppé and Komzák with the orchestras of Košice, Bratislava and Žilina.