Celso Antunes

The versatile Brazilian conductor Celso Antunes has been the principal conductor of the Netherlands Radio Choir since August 2008. He also teaches choral conducting at the Haute École de Musique de Génève. Celso Antunes (1959) began his musical training in Brazil. He studied voice and conducting at the University of São Paulo and the Musikhochschule Köln.  From 1994 to 1998, he was chief conductor of the Neues Rheinisches Kammerorchester.
During the same period he was also chief conductor of the Antwerp ensemble Champ d’Action, with which he performed numerous world premieres. From 2002 to 2007 Antunes was music director and chief conductor of the National Chamber Choir of Ireland. Antunes’s repertoire ranges from choral music of the Renaissance to contemporary music. He has conducted the Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble Modern and the Tippett Ensemble, which he founded;  he also linked his name to premieres of music by Wolfgang Rihm, Jonathan Harvey, Michael Tippett, Hans Zender, Brice Pauset and Lera Auerbach.   Antunes has been active on renowned European musical stages and festivals  for many years. He was invited to conduct at the Donaueschinger Musiktage,  the Festival of Flanders, the Musikbiennale München, the Kurt-Weill-Festival in Dessau, the Living Music Festival in Dublin and November Music in ‘s-Hertogenbosch,  to name only a few. Celso Antunes regularly conducts celebrated ensembles such as the SWR Vokalensemble in Stuttgart, the BBC Singers in London, the Berliner Rundfunkchor, the Prague Chamber Choir and the Vlaams Radio  Koor in Brussels, and he has worked with Sir Simon Rattle, Zubin Mehta, Mariss Jansons, Charles Dutoit, Peter Eötvös and  Sylvain Cambreling.  Antunes has served as guest conductor to the Manchester Camerata, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, the Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra and the Radio Sinfonieorchester NDR Hannover.  He regularly returns to his native country and to the Ulster Orchestra of Belfast. Antunes has performed with orchestras such as the Cappella Istropolitana Bratislava, the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Gürzenich Orchestra Köln, the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, the Irish Chamber Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Latvia in Riga. He returns to Brazil every year to conduct Camerata Fukuda and the State Symphony Orchestra of São Paulo.  Celso Antunes conducted the Netherlands Radio Choir in a performance of Tristan Murail’s Les sept paroles in the Cité de la Musique, together with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, con-ducted by Pascal Rophé. He has also conducted at the City of London Festival with the BBC Singers, at the Salzburger Festspiele with SWR Vokalensemble and in the public broadcasting NTR series in the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic.