Leslie Suganandarajah

Born in Sri Lanka in 1983, Leslie Suganandarajah moved to Germany with his family at the age of two and grew up in Hanover. After learning to play the piano, organ, and flute in primary school, he began studying music at the Hanover Academy of Music in 2002; two years later, he moved to Lübeck to study piano with Jacques Ammon and conducting with Gerd Müller-Lorenz. He graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar, where he was taught by Nicolás Pasquet, Anthony Bramall, and Golo Berg, among others. In 2011, Suganandarajah was accepted into the Conductors’ Forum, the support program of the German Music Council. There he received the Hermann Hildebrandt Scholarship, which led to an assistantship with Michael Sanderling and the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra. He began his first position as Kapellmeister at Theater Koblenz in the 2012-13 season and moved to the Landestheater Linz in 2017. Suganandarajah took up the position of Music Director of the Landestheater Salzburg in 2019. He introduced himself to the city of Mozart with a new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin; last season he led productions of Verdi’s Aida, Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles, and Stuart MacRae’s Anthropocene. Previously in the summer of 2024, he conducted Weber’s Der Freischütz at the Eutin Festival. In the concert hall, Leslie Suganandarajah has worked with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the MDR Symphony Orchestra, and the London Mozart Players, among others. In the 2023-24 season, he made his debuts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Following his successful debut with the Chineke! Orchestra, he was immediately entrusted with a European tour last season, which took him to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Bozar in Brussels, and the Alte Oper Frankfurt, among others.

July 2024