About
The 2019/20 season marks Hannu Lintu’s seventh year as Chief Conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Guest highlights of the 2019/20 season include returns to the Boston and Detroit symphony orchestras, Orchestre de Paris (following an acclaimed debut in 2018), Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
Lintu also debuts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg and Tonkünstler-Orchester. Recent engagements include debuts with the Boston Symphony and Hungarian National Philharmonic orchestras and returns to the Baltimore, St Louis
and Cincinnati symphony orchestras, New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra and NDR Elbphilharmonie.
In May 2019 Lintu was appointed Chief Conductor of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet, a role which he takes up in January 2022 shortly after his eighth and final season as the FRSO’s Chief Conductor. The appointment follows a series of hugely successful productions including Tristan und Isolde in 2016, Sibelius’s Kullervo in 2017 and Berg’s Wozzeck in Spring 2019; he also conducts Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in January-February 2020. Lintu also regularly conducts at the
Savonlinna Festival, most recently for productions of Verdi’s Otello (2018) and Sallinen’s Kullervo (2017).
Hannu Lintu has made several recordings for Ondine, BIS, Naxos, Avie and Hyperion.
He studied cello and piano at the Sibelius Academy, where he later studied conducting with Jorma Panula. He participated in masterclasses with Myung-Whun Chung at the L’Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and took first prize at the Nordic Conducting Competition in Bergen in 1994.