Biography
Matthias Pintscher is the newly appointed music director of the Kansas City Symphony, beginning in the 2024–25 season. He has just concluded a successful decade-long tenure as the music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (EIC), the iconic Parisian contemporary ensemble founded by Pierre Boulez and winner of the 2022 Polar Prize. During his stewardship, Pintscher led this most adventurous institution in the creation of dozens of world premieres by cutting edge composers from all over the world, and took the ensemble on tours around the globe — to Asia and North America, and throughout Europe to all the major festivals and concert halls.
The 2023–24 season marks Pintscher’s fourth year as creative partner at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he conducts a new work by inti figgis-vizueta, as well as an immersive video-concert of Messiaen’s From the Canyon to the Stars. He also tours with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, where he is artist-in-residence. As guest conductor, he returns to the RAI Milano Musica, Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, NDR Hamburg, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Filarmonica della Scala, Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble, and the Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Barcelona, Lahti symphony orchestras. He has conducted opera productions for the Berlin Staatsoper, Vienna Staatsoper, and Paris’s Théatre du Châtelet. In 2024 he returns to the Berlin Staatsoper for Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee.
Matthias Pintscher is also well known as a composer, and his works appear frequently on the programs of major symphony orchestras throughout the world. In August 2021 he was the focus of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival — a weeklong celebration of his works with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra as well as a residency by the EIC with symphonic and chamber music performances. His third violin concerto, Assonanza, written for Leila Josefowicz, was premiered in January 2022 by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.