VAHAN MARDIROSSIAN
Conductor
“Vahan Mardirossian … today establishes himself as a conductor of the first rank.”
Vahan Mardirossian is Music Director of the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie (ORCW) in Mons, Chief Conductor of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong and, since the 2025/26 season, Chief Conductor of the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice. Born in Yerevan and based in France, he pursues a dual career as conductor and pianist and regularly directs keyboard concertos by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Grieg and Shostakovich from the piano. As a guest conductor he has appeared with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic, Japan Philharmonic and New Japan Philharmonic orchestras, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, the Orchestre Colonne and the Luxembourg Chamber Orchestra, and in Germany with the Philharmonie Südwestfalen, the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie and the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen.
In the 2026/27 season he leads the ORCW in a complete cycle of Mozart’s violin concertos with Lorenzo Gatto, in Mons and in Ghent. In March 2027 he conducts a programme in Mons marking Lithuania’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, with music by Čiurlionis, Latėnas and Andrius Žlabys, who also appears as piano soloist.
Since 2022 he and the ORCW have accompanied the semi-finals of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, where Le Soir praised a “remarkable, generous and attentive” performance that gave each candidate exactly the climate and impetus they needed. In 2017 and 2019 he led the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine on tours of Japan. His recordings as a conductor include Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 with Sarah Traubel, Roman Lyulkin and the ORCW (Aparté, 2025), the album “Il Mondo Felice” with Anna Samuil and Tatiana Samouil (Cypres, 2025) and “Chants de l’isolé”, concertante works by Philippe Hersant and Benoît Menut with the Trio Karénine (Mirare, 2023), which received a Diapason d’or and five stars in Classica. With the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice he has released a series of albums on Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics, among them works by Mozart, Dvořák and Chopin.
Vahan Mardirossian took up conducting at the age of fifteen as music director of the youth chamber orchestra of the Armenian Cultural Centre. An invitation from Kurt Masur to conduct the orchestra of the Manhattan School of Music during a conducting seminar in New York set him firmly on this path. In 2005 he founded the orchestra Maestria, with which he appeared throughout France, including at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and the Halle aux Grains in Toulouse. From 2010 to 2019 he was Principal Conductor of the Orchestre de Caen and from 2011 Music Director of the National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia. In September 2019 he became Chief Conductor of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, and in January 2020 he succeeded Augustin Dumay and Frank Braley as Music Director of the ORCW. His repertoire extends from Bach to the music of our time, including works by Dutilleux, Ligeti, Kagel, Crumb, Rautavaara, Saariaho, Rihm, Escaich, Hersant, Canat de Chizy, Mulsant and Tanguy.
As a pianist, Vahan Mardirossian studied at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris in the class of Jacques Rouvier and graduated with distinction in 1996. He has performed as a soloist under conductors including Kurt Masur, Paavo Järvi, Yutaka Sado, John Axelrod and Yuri Ahronovitch, and in 2017 gave a recital at Carnegie Hall in New York. For twenty years he toured as the pianist of the violinist Ivry Gitlis; his other partners have included Augustin Dumay, Akiko Suwanai, Sergei Babayan, Alexandre Kantorow, Lars Vogt, Sergei Nakariakov and Gary Hoffman. His piano recordings include works by Bach, Handel, Schubert, Brahms and Éric Tanguy, as well as Beethoven’s complete sonatas for violin and piano with Teiko Maehashi (Sony Music, 2025). In 2016 the President of Armenia awarded him the title of Honoured Artist of Armenia.
Felsner Artists is the general management of Vahan Mardirossian.
