The biography of Austrian composer ROLAND BAUMGARTNER is impressive. He has been involved in music since the age of five. He studied composition, piano and trumpet at the Vienna Conservatory. He graduated at the age of 18, and at 21 he was already the youngest director in the history of the Salzburg School of Music. During that time he created the ballet Bergsegen, premiered by the Royal Ballet in London. In 1979 he went to specialise with Leonard Bernstein, who had a strong influence on the young musician. Baumgartner is not only an active composer but also a conductor. He has toured with renowned orchestras such as the Czechoslovak Philharmonic, the NDR Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Festival Orchestra, to name but a few. He has composed the scores for numerous films – “Death Games”, “Joseph’s Daughter”, “Body and Soul”, “Jungle Fighters”, “Ali Baba”, etc. Roland Baumgartner was the first Western composer to make a co-production between the former USSR and the USA, and it was on the film version of the ballet Ali Baba. It features soloists from the Atlanta Ballet Company and the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, and the libretto was written by the daughter of former Soviet Foreign Minister, Mariana Shevardnadze.
His orchestral work Missa Pacis was composed on the occasion of the 200^th anniversary of the American Constitution. It was premiered in Bonn and Linz in cooperation with the Brucknerhaus Linz and the ORF. To mark Hollywood’s 100^th anniversary, Roland Baumgartner produced a symphonic poem which appeared in 1996 as a CD series.
Baumgartner is also the author of many stage works. In 2004, he presented The House of Dreams, a musical about the Austrian painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser.  In 2008 he completed the Opera Mystica based on the texts of Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Abraham and Mohammed. Its message is the dialogue between cultures. In 2010, the neo-romantic opera Luther was premiered in the Hof Theater, further performances in Bayreuth followed. A year later the opera Hoffmann’s World for the Theatre Hof in Bamberg was performed. He is the author of the operettas The Queen of Roses, The True Cavalier, The Divine Bacchus, etc. In 2020, Baumgartner created an opera about the 1^st President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, which was broadcast on Kazakh television in December of the same year. Among his recent works is his Violin Concerto Sky Above Us, again dedicated to the dialogue between different peoples and cultures (2021).
Baumgartner is known to Bulgarian audiences for his productions of the opera Sissi – The Soul of an Emperess and the chamber opera The Marilyn Monroe Trial.
In October 2019 the Sofia Philharmonic performed his Symphonia Globalis (1996), written for large orchestra, chorus and two soloists.