Marko Ivanović

Marko Ivanović, the current principal conductor of the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice, was born in Prague in 1976. However, despite his youth, Ivanović has a wealth of experience and is known to listeners at home and abroad, in Japan among other places.

At Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts he studied not only conducting, under Radomil Eliška and Jiří Bělohlávek, but also musical composition, in the class of Prof. Václav Riedlbauch. As a composer he produced pieces such as Overture in Farewell, Madman’s Early Suite, the opera The Girl and Death, chamber music, and in particular a great deal of music for radio and film. He has worked with the theatres Alfréd ve dvoře, Divadlo na zábradlí, Divadlo v Celetné, Viola, Damúza, DISK, Studio Dva, Myron Ostrava, and Český Těšín Town Theatre, and with the directors Ctibor Turba, Hana Kofránková, and Aleš Vrzák. He is also involved in the field of functional music in his role as an external teacher at the Academy of Performing Arts. Ivanović’s compositions have been played at many places in Europe, including at such prestigious festivals as the Marathon of Contemporary Music, Young Prague, and Třídení plus in the Czech Republic and – further afield – Bratislava’s Days of Contemporary Music, the world renowned Wien Modern and Europe Young Classic in Berlin, as well as other festivals in Budapest, Cologne, Katowice, and Barcelona. He is also greatly skilled at arrangement, not only of classical music but also in other genres.

As a conductor, Ivanović has worked with various Czech and international orchestras (The Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra, Poland’s Filharmonia Sudecka, the Toyama Academy Orchestra in Japan). In 2003, he was named laureate at the Grzegorz Fitelberg International Competition for Young Conductors in Katowice. Some of the key milestones in his career to date include his first appearance in the main programme at the Prague Spring International Music Festival in 2010, where he performed with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. He initially worked with Prague’s National Theatre on an external footing (P. Glass: Beauty and the Beast, B. Britten: Curlew River), before in September 2006 beginning a permanent engagement as director. There he has taken part in productions such as Mozart’s opera La clemenza di Tito, the opera-trial Tomorrow will… and Suchý and Šlitr’s jazz opera A Walk Worthwhile (which he also did the arrangements for).

Ivanović is also actively involved in music promotion. His concerts for young people, cycles of which took place at the Czech Philharmonic for several years and are now continuing in Pardubice, have proven very popular.