Elena Schwarz

The Australian-Swiss conductor Elena Schwarz, who was born in 1985 in Lugano, initially studied cello and musicology before turning to conducting. She completed her master’s degree with Laurent Gay at the Geneva Conservatory. She then specialized in contemporary music with Arturo Tamayo at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. Additional influences on her formation came from Peter Eötvös and Matthias Pintscher, as well as from master classes with Neeme Järvi and Bernard Haitink. She won the Norwegian Princess Astrid Competition in 2014 and second prize at the Jorma Panula Conducting Competition in Vaasa in 2015. Schwarz was an assistant to Mikko Franck at the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in the 2017-18 season. During this time she also took up assistantships with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under Asher Fisch and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under Marko Letonja, which subsequently established the position of Associate Conductor for her. In the 2018-19 season, she was selected for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Dudamel Fellowship Program. Guest conducting engagements have taken Schwarz to the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the WDR Sinfonieorchester, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, as well as to such new music formations as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and Collegium Novum Zürich. In the 2021-22 season, she conducted the BBC Philharmonic, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Detroit and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, among others. In the realm of opera, Elena Schwarz has performed at Norwegian Opera (Hansel and Gretel) and conducted the premiere of Adam Maor’s The Sleeping Thousand at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, which was followed by additional performances in Luxembourg, Lisbon, and Helsinki. In June she conducted a new production of Grieg’s Peer Gynt at the Opéra de Lyon.

Lucerne Festival debut on 21 August 2016 with an ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Academy in a program of works by Olga Neuwirth.

July 2022