Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen has been chief conductor of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie since 2017 and music director of the KBS Symphony Orchestra in Seoul since 2022.
Praised for his thinking “in large forms,” Pietari Inkinen has conducted renowned orchestras including the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 2023/24 season, he makes his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra, conducting Wagner’s Tannhäuser for the first time at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The music of Richard Wagner is central to Pietari Inkinen’s work. In 2023, he conducted the new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival (directed by Valentin Schwarz). His acclaimed performances of the Ring cycle at Opera Australia in 2013 and 2016 earned Inkinen two awards: Australia’s 2014 Helpmann Award for Best Music Direction and a 2016 Green Room Award for Best Opera Conductor. He also received the Franco Abbiati Award from the Italian National Association of Music Critics for his 2014 production of Rheingold at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. Additional opera productions have taken him to the Finnish National Opera, the Théâtre de la Monnaie, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Bavarian State Opera, and the Semperoper Dresden, where he conducted a highly successful new production of Eugene Onegin.
Pietari Inkinen has been chief conductor with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Prague Symphony Orchestra and the Ludwigsburg Schlossfestspiele Orchestra. During his time as music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, he recorded the complete Sibelius symphonies for Naxos. With the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, he is working on a complete recording of all Dvořák symphonies (SWRmusic). In October 2023, the cinematic portrait A Baton and a Passport – The Conductor Pietari Inkinen (directed by Sven Rech) was released.
Pietari Inkinen is not only a conductor, but also a successful violinist. He studied with Zakhar Bron at the Cologne Academy of Music before continuing his training as a conductor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.