Matthias Pintscher

Since the start of the 2024/25 season, Matthias Pintscher has been the new Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. To mark the beginning of his tenure, he is embarking on a European tour with the orchestra: after the first stop in Amsterdam, the orchestra performs today at Musikfest Berlin and tomorrow at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Prior to this, Matthias Pintscher concluded his successful ten-year tenure as Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, founded in 1980 by Pierre Boulez and awarded the Polar Music Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy in 2022. With the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pintscher continued to champion new works by emerging composers of the 21st century, presented performances of iconic works from the 20th-century avant-garde, and conducted numerous world premieres.

In the 2023/24 season, Matthias Pintscher served for the fourth year as Creative Partner of the Cincinnati Symphony, where he conducted a new work by inti figgis-vizueta and an immersive video performance of Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles. He also toured with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, where he is Artist in Residence. Guest engagements took him to orchestras such as the Orchestre de chambre de Paris, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya, Sinfonia Lahti and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. In addition, Pintscher conducted opera productions at the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden (Wagner’s Lohengrin and Der fliegende Holländer), at the Vienna State Opera (Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando), and at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. In 2024 he returned to the Berlin State Opera for Beat Furrer’s opera Violetter Schnee.

Matthias Pintscher is recognised as one of the leading composers of our time, with his works appearing on the programmes of major symphony orchestras worldwide. In August 2021, he was the focus of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival – a week-long celebration of his works with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and a residency by the Ensemble Intercontemporain featuring symphonic and chamber music performances. Pintscher’s Third Violin Concerto, Assonanza, written for Leila Josefowicz, was premiered in January 2022 by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Another premiere in the 2021/22 season was neharot, commissioned by Suntory Hall Tokyo, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Staatskapelle Dresden, which appointed him Capell-Compositeur. In the 2016/17 season, he was the first Composer in Residence at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg; from 2014 to 2017 he served as Artist in Residence with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and he has also held residencies at the Salzburg Festival and the Lucerne Festival. Since 2014, Matthias Pintscher has taught composition at the Juilliard School in New York.