Markus Lehtinen

Markus, who was born in 1959, is a pianist and conductor and hails from Helsinki, He studied piano with Meri Louhos and orchestral conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy in his home city. He also studied composition with Aulis Sallinen and Einojuhani Rautavaara. He won the Nordic Conductors’ Competition in Stockholm in 1987 and was joined the Royal Opera in Copenhagen as a conductor from 1988 to 1993. Markus was engaged at the Finnish National Opera from 1985 to 1988 and from 1992 to 1997, and subsequently appeared there as a guest conductor. Markus Lehtinen was principal conductor of the Jyväskylä Sinfonia from 1999 to 2002, with whom he recorded his teacher Sallinen’s opera Aleksis Kivi for the Ondine label in 2002. He has also appeared as a guest conductor with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. Since 2004, he has been a professor at the Opera School of the Sibelius Academy, where he has served as musical director for numerous opera productions.

As a ballet conductor, he is closely associated with the work of John Neumeier: he has recently conducted performances of The Lady of the Camellias with, amongst others, the Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris and the Vienna State Ballet, as well as Romeo and Juliet, Odyssee and The Sleeping Beauty with the Hamburg Ballet. His association with this company dates back to 1993, when he first conducted the orchestra there in John Neumeier’s A Cinderella Story. In 1999, Lehtinen conducted Igor Stravinsky’s ballet scores Petrushka and The Rite of Spring for the Bavarian State Ballet as part of a three-part evening, for which Amir Hosseinpour and Saburo Teshigawara created the respective choreographies.

(Information as of March 2026)