Principal Guest Conductor Donald Runnicles is currently in his 12th year of artistic partnership with Music Director Robert Spano. One of today’s most consistently acclaimed conductors of opera and symphonic repertoire, Mr. Runnicles is also General Music Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Orchestra, and Music Director of the Grand Teton Music Festival. He was previously the Music Director and Principal Conductor of the San Francisco Opera.
Mr. Runnicles’s acclaimed recordings with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra include a concert disc with soprano Christine Brewer singing Strauss. With the Atlanta Symphony, Mr. Runnicles has also recorded the Mozart Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony¸ and a Brittania album. During the 2009-10 season, Mr. Runnicles and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus returned to the Berlin Philharmonic to perform Brahms’s A German Requiem. The concerts marked their third collaboration with the German orchestra.
Mr. Runnicles has ongoing musical relationships with today’s finest orchestras and opera companies. He also enjoys accompanying singers at the piano and playing chamber music.