Kirill Garrievich Petrenko (Russian: Кирилл Гарриевич Петренко; Latin script: Kirill Garrievič Petrenko) was born on February 11, 1972. He is a conductor from Russia and Austria. He currently serves as the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Early life
Petrenko was born in Omsk, which was part of the Soviet Union, to a father who played the violin and a mother who studied music. He has Jewish heritage but did not practice religion much during his childhood. His father was born in Lviv, now part of Ukraine. Petrenko began studying piano and gave his first public performance at age 11.
At 18, when borders between countries opened, Petrenko and his family moved to Austria. His father joined the Symphony Orchestra Vorarlberg there. Petrenko studied music at the Vorarlberg Conservatory in Feldkirch, Austria, and graduated with honors in piano. He later continued his studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. His teachers and mentors included conductor Uroš Lajovic, as well as other musicians such as Myung-Whun Chung, Edward Downes, Péter Eötvös, Ferdinand Leitner, Roberto Carnevale, and Semyon Bychkov.
Career
Petrenko made his conducting debut in 1995 in Vorarlberg with Benjamin Britten's Let's Make an Opera. He worked as a Kapellmeister at the Vienna Volksoper from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002, he was Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) of the Südthüringisches Staatstheater, located at the Meiningen Court Theatre. During this time, he conducted Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2001 over four days in a row, which was his first professional work with Wagner's operas.
Petrenko was GMD of the Komische Oper Berlin from 2002 to 2007. He first performed with the Bavarian State Opera in 2003 and returned in 2009 for a production of Leoš Janáček's Jenůfa. In October 2010, he was named the next GMD of the Bavarian State Opera, with the position beginning in 2013.
He first guest-conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 2006 and again in 2009 and 2012. A planned performance in 2014 was canceled because of an injury. From 2013 to 2015, he conducted Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival. Petrenko supported Ukraine's right to self-governance during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia.
In June 2015, the Berlin Philharmonic chose Petrenko to be its next chief conductor, his first role leading a symphony orchestra outside of opera, with a planned start after 2018. That same month, his contract with the Bavarian State Opera, originally ending in 2018, was extended through 2021, though he would serve as a guest conductor in the final season. In October 2015, the Berlin Philharmonic announced he would officially begin as chief conductor in the 2019–2020 season, with guest appearances before that. His official start date was confirmed for August 19, 2019.
In March 2020, Petrenko and Monika Grütters, Germany's Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, supported the Musiker-Nothilfe, an organization helping freelance musicians affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. He criticized the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a "knife in the back of the entire peaceful world" that February.
Petrenko has promoted Arnold Schoenberg's music with the Berlin Philharmonic, including Verklärte Nacht, the Chamber Symphony No. 1, and the first recording in over 20 years of the oratorio fragment Die Jakobsleiter, released in 2025 as part of a set.