Daniele Rustioni

Conductor Daniele Rustioni has been active in both opera and symphonic music internationally as well as in his native Italy. He is the music director of the Ulster Orchestra. Rustioni was born in Milan, Italy, in 1983. As a child, he sang in the boychoir of Milan’s La Scala opera house. His first instrument was the cello, and he soon added piano and organ. Rustioni attended the Milan Conservatory, studying organ, piano, and composition. As he gravitated toward conducting, he took lessons from Gilberto Serembe and then went on to the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, where he worked with Gianluigi Gelmetti. At the Royal Academy of Music in London, he studied further with Gianandrea Noseda, who backed Rustioni’s debut at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 2007. In 2008 and 2009, Rustioni was a Jette Parker Young Artist at London’s Covent Garden Opera House, and he became assistant to Antonio Pappano there in 2009. In 2011, he made his U.S. debut, conducting Cherubini’s Médée at New York state’s Glimmerglass Festival. That year, Rustioni’s career as an orchestral conductor also began as he was named the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra della Toscana; he was named principal conductor three years later and remains the orchestra’s artistic director, although he stepped down in 2020 as conductor. In 2012, Rustioni conducted the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony on a recital album by bass-baritone Erwin Schrott. Rustioni has gone on to conduct performances at leading opera houses around Britain, continental Europe, and the U.S., including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg, and the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, among others. In the orchestral realm, he has led such groups as the London Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as a guest. Rustioni became the principal conductor of France’s Opéra national de Lyon in 2017, and in 2019, he took up the baton as chief conductor of the Ulster Orchestra; he was later elevated to music director, and his contract was extended through 2024. Rustioni is married to violinist Francesca Dego, and the pair have recorded concertos of Paganini and Wolf-Ferrari together. He has recorded for Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, and Dynamic, backing cellist Enrico Dindo on the latter label on a 2023 recording of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, with the Orchestra della Toscana. ~ James Manheim