The Iranian conductor Hossein Pishkar became known when he was awarded the prestigious Deutscher Dirigentenpreis in 2017, supported by leading orchestras in Cologne and West German Radio (WDR). Hossein Pishkar was also awarded the Ernst-von-Schuch-Preis, which is awarded annually in cooperation with the Conductors’ Forum.

As a guest conductor, Hossein Pishkar leads orchestras such as the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra, Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, the Orchester Philharmonique de Strasbourg, Orchester de Chambre de Lausanne, the Royal Chapel of Copenhagen, Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini, the NDR Radiophilharmonie, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, Stuttgart State Orchestra and the WDR-Sinfonieorchester. Furthermore, he conducted at the Royal Danish Opera the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet (directed by Barrie Kosky), Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (directed by Annabel Arden), Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (directed by Jetske Mijnssen), as well as Die Nase by Dmitri Schostakowitsch (directed by Àlex Ollé), at the Staatsoper Stuttgart Die Zauberflöte (directed by Barrie Kosky) and at the Ravenna Festival Rigoletto (directed by Cristina Mazzavillani Muti).

As an assistant, he worked with François–Xavier Roth in May 2019 on the rehearsal of Philippe Manoury’s Lab.Oratorio with the Gürzenich Orchestra and took on concerts as second conductor in the Kölner Philharmonie and the Philharmonie de Paris as well as in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Hossein Pishkar assisted Sylvain Cambreling with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie for Alban Berg’s Lulu Suite and Rebecca Saunders’ Violin Concerto Still. In the 2015/16 season he assisted Daniel Raiskin, then chief conductor of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie in Koblenz.

He attended master classes of Riccardo Muti (2017, Aida as part of the Italian Opera Academy in Ravenna) and Sir Bernard Haitink (2016, Lucerne Festival Orchestra). From 2015 he took lessons from John Carewe, Marko Letonja, Nicolás Pasquet, Mark Stringer and Johannes Schlaefli as part of the Conductors Forum course program.

Before Hossein Pishkar began his conducting studies with Rüdiger Bohn at the Robert Schumann University in Düsseldorf in 2012, he studied composition and piano in Tehran, the city where he was born in 1988. In Iran he has already conducted the Tehran Youth Orchestra and the Tehran Music School Orchestra. As a child he began to study traditional Persian music, including playing the tar, a traditional stringed instrument from Persian culture.

2023/2024

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