Lukasz Borowicz

He has served as Artistic Director of the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra since March 2007. Born in Warsaw in 1977, he studied with Bogusław Madey at the Fryderyk Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw, where he later also received a doctorate in conducting under the supervision of Antoni Wit.  In 2005-06 he served as an assistant to Kazimierz Kord at the Grand Theatre – National Opera in Warsaw. He had earlier worked as an assistant to Antoni Wit at the Warsaw Philharmonic (2002-05) and to Iván Fischer at the Budapest Festival Orchestra (the 2000/01 season). In 2006 he was appointed Chief Guest Conductor of the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra. He held several grants from the Ministry of Culture and is a prizewinner of four conducting  competitions: in Trento (1999), Athens (2000), Porto (2002) and Bamberg (2004). His honours also include the ‘Passport’ Award from the Polityka weekly (2008).

Łukasz Borowicz has appeared as a guest conductor with many ensembles including the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the Komische Oper Berlin, the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Staatskapelle Halle, the Orchestra of the Opera in Marseille, I Pomeriggi Musicali of Milan, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Russian National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ukrainian National Philharmonic Orchestra Kiew and most of Polish symphony orchestras including the Warsaw Philharmonic.

He made his operatic debut at the National Opera in Warsaw with Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  His subsequent operatic projects have included Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with the same company, Don Giovanni (Kraków Opera), Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Dvorak’s Rusalka (Grand Theatre in Łódź). He has also conducted the ballet performances at the National Opera (Swan Lake, La Bayadere). He has made recordings with such prominent singers as Ewa Podleś, Piotr Beczała, Mariusz Kwiecień, Samuel Ramey.

Łukasz Borowicz has done a great deal to re-discover in concert performance and recordings with the Polish Radio SO the almost forgotten works, such as the operas Lodoïska by Cherubini, Roman Statkowski’s Maria, Spohr’s Berggeist and Grażyna Bacewicz’s The Adventures of King Arthur. They were all released on CD by Polish Radio. He has recorded Bacewicz’s violin concertos for Chandos (with Joanna Kurkowicz as soloist) and begun the recordings of the complete works by Andrzej Panufnik (three CDs for cpo are already released). His recordings have been awarded the Diapason d’Or (March 2010) and the Polish Fryderyk Prize (2007, 2010) and received nominations to Midem Classical Awards (2008) and Preis der Deutschen Schallplatenkritik (2009). In August 2010 his Panufnik recording for cpo was the BBC Music Magazine’s Orchestral Choice.

In August 2009 he made his debut at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro conducting the Haydn Orchestra (with Ewa Podleś). During the 2009/10 season he gave concert performances of Moniuszko’s Flis (The Raftsman), Weber’s Euryanthe and Szymon Laks’s L’hirondelle inattendue  (with the Polish Radio SO). In July 2010 he made a debut at the  Komische Oper in Berlin and in August he conducted the Hanover Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Moniuszko’s Halka during the Schleswig-Holstein Festival.

His major engagements in the 2010/11season included Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Grand Theatre in Łódź), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (Kraków Opera), Donizetti’s Maria Padilla (15th Ludwig van Beethoven Festival), Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco (Poznań Philharmonic) and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (National Opera in Warsaw).