Oleg Ptashnikov

Born in 1970 in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Oleg Ptashnikov, while studying at a music gymnasium, became the winner of the Ukrainian and the All-Union competitions. In 1989, he continued his studies at Moscow Gnessin Institute simultaneously at the musicology and piano faculties, where his professors were N. S. Gulyanitskaya and O. D. Boshnyakovich. In parallel with his studies at the institute, he worked as a music director at the V. Mayakovsky Drama Theater. In the late 1990s he moved to Germany, where he completed his postgraduate studies in Symphony Conducting in Dresden (Prof. E. Klemm) and the Piano Graduate Schools in Munich and Saarbrücken (Professors O. Dressler and R. Leonardy).
Since 2002 Oleg Ptashnikov has been a conductor at the Am Gärtnerplatz Opera House in Munich. His repertoire includes over 50 operas and ballets and 500 conducted performances, spanning styles and eras from Mozart and Rossini through Verdi and Tchaikovsky to Britten, Henze and Glass. In addition to conducting, he continues to perform as a pianist.
From 2014 to the end of 2019, Oleg Ptashnikov was Mariss Jansons’s permanent assistant, including the performances at the Salzburg Festival (“Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by D. D. Shostakovich and “The Queen of Spades” by P. I. Tchaikovsky) with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and various projects of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.