Marc Soustrot, Conductor

Marc Soustrot is known as an inspiring orchestra leader, an exacting opera conductor and a recording artist of distinction. He has worked with some of the most renowned musicians and ensembles in Europe and beyond since his debut over four decades ago.

Mr Soustrot is currently Chief Conductor of the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra in Denmark’s second city, and in 2019 completes a noteworthy tenure as Chief Conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. Since the start of his career he has cultivated a specialism in new music and the French orchestral repertoire. His recorded cycle of the complete orchestral works of Saint-Saëns with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra was hailed by Gramophone magazine in 2017 as ‘exceptional’.

For eighteen seasons Mr Soustrot was Chief Conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique des Pays de la Loire and later held the same position at the Beethoven Orchester Bonn and Het Brabants Orkest Eindhoven. As a guest conductor he has worked with the Staatskapelle Dresden, Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, Filharmonie Antwerpen, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, the Bamberg Symphony, English Chamber and Danish National Symphony Orchestras and the Philharmonic Orchestras of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Luxembourg, Barcelona and Tokyo.

Mr Soustrot has appeared at some of the great opera houses of Europe in repertoire ranging from Offenbach to Berg and beyond. In 2015, he made his debut at the Dresden Semperoper in a new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande staged by Álex Ollé and La Fura dels Baus. In 2012 he conducted Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites at the Royal Swedish Opera and the Stuttgart Opera, where he returned to conduct Peter Konwitschny’s production of Götterdämmerung, Jossi Wieler’s production of Siegfried and Stefan Herheim’s production of Der Rosenkavalier. He has worked at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, the Teatro Real Madrid, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, La Monnaie de Munt in Brussels and at the Royal Danish Opera and the Norwegian Opera.

Recent engagements have seen Mr Soustrot lead the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart and return to the Beethoven Orchester Bonn. He has conducted on a number of award winning CDs on the Naxos, Alpha, Timpani, Animato, Erato, Danacord and Dacapo labels and in 2008, was honoured with the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Mr Soustrot was born in Lyon and studied trombone and piano at the Conservatoire de Lyon until 1969, when he began training as a conductor with Manuel Rosenthal in Paris.