Bassem Akiki

Lebanese-Polish conductor, he studied music at the Beirut Conservatory while he simultaneously studied philosophy. He graduated from the Academy of Music in Krakow and Wroclaw. His studies of philosophy allowed him to analyze the relationship between philosophy and music; he has written his thesis on Peter Eötvös around Angels in America: Anthropocentrism and Theocentrism in the 21st Century and conducted this work at the Contemporary Opera Festival in Wroclaw in 2012. At the age of 24, he conducted La traviata at the 'Wroclaw Opera where he held office until 2013, when he made his debut at the Polish National Opera where he conducted Nabucco and then Iolanta by Tchaikovsky and Le Château de Barbe-Bleue by Bartók. His lyrical and symphonic repertoire includes Die Zauberflöte, Così fan tutte, La finta giardiniera and Don Giovanni by Mozart, Carmen by Bizet, Nabucco, La traviata, Rigoletto, Joan of Arc and Falstaff by Verdi, La Femme sans ombre by Strauss, Les Contes d'Hoffmann by Offenbach, Roméo et Juliette by Gounod, Turandot, Madame Butterfly, Tosca et La Bohème by Puccini, Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky, L'Ange de feu by Prokofiev, To Be Sung by Dusapin, Powder Her Face by Adès. He was a guest of the Monnaie de Bruxelles, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Warsaw National Opera, Sinfonia Varsovia, the Orchester national de Polish Radio. Since 2018, he has served as artistic director of the Bytom Opera in Silesia and was, from 2015 to 2020, artistic director of the NFM (Wroclaw festival in Poland). In the contemporary field, he directed the world creations of Slow Man by N. Lens and J.-M. Coetzee at the Poznań Festival 2012, of Médulla with the music of Björk at La Monnaie in 2015, of Orfeo and Majnun at the Monnaie and at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in 2018, Frankenstein* by Mark Géry at La Monnaie in 2019. He made his debut at the OnR.

Update May 2020