Frédéric Chaslin is a French composer, conductor and pianist. He started out as an organ prodigy, at the age of ten, he gave a concert at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire and then at the Salzburg Mozarteum, notably with Aldo Cicollini for piano, Paul von Schilhawsky for German Lied, and Leopold Hager for conducting. From 1986 to 1989, he was Daniel Barenboim’s assistant at the Orchestre de Paris and the Bayreuth Festival. From 1989 to 1992 he was Pierre Boulez’s assistant at the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Boulez entrusted him with numerous concerts, including one for the first edition of « Wien Modern », created by Claudia Abbado. From 1992 to 1995, he was musical director of the Opéra de Rouen. He began his Austrian career at the Bregenz Festival from 1993 to 1996 with Nabucco, followed by Fidelio, a success which opened the doors to the Vienna Staatsoper, where he has conducted ever since, celebrating his 250th performance in May 2023. From 1998 to 2001, and again from 2011 to 2019, he was appointed Music Director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1937 for Otto Klemperer, and from 2004 to 2007 Music Director of Mannheim’s Nationaltheater, where his repertoire included all the major works of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.
Frédéric Chaslin has conducted all the world’s major orchestras and opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, the operas of Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Paris Opera, Madrid, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Budapest, Venice’s La Fenice, and Milan’s La Scala. In the symphonic repertoire, he has conducted all the great French, German, Italian, and British orchestras, from the London Symphony to the Vienna Philharmonic, and many more.
Since 2007, he has been devoting himself more particularly to operatic composition, and his career has taken on new impetus with the recording of his opera Wuthering Heights with the LSO and the Philharmonia Choir in London. In 2019, he signed a contract with the prestigious Viennese publisher Universal Edition, with whom he is publishing his entire catalogue of over 150 works to date. Since 2020, Frédéric Chaslin has been developing original projects in musical theatre, opera and arrangements of operatic works for small ensembles, in order to promote opera in places where it is not usually adapted. Notable examples include his orchestration of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande for 15 instruments, premiered in 2022 at the Hungarian State Opera, or his Tosca for 29 musicians, commissioned by the Theatre de La Monnaie in Brussels. He has also written two books, La musique dans tous les sens, an essay on contemporary music, and Dans la peau de Gustav Mahler, a fictional work to accompany his reconstruction of Mahler’s 10th symphony, which will join Universal Edition’s complete edition of Mahler’s works.
