Versatile, insightful and highly musical – these are just some of the characteristics that distinguish Felix Mildenberger as a conductor. Orchestras appreciate his deep focus in dealing with music and his great musicality, combined with his gentle character. Since winning the Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition in 2018, Felix Mildenberger has been the London Symphony Orchestra’s Assistant Conductor and therefore he works on a regular basis with Sir Simon Rattle, François Xavier Roth, Gianandrea Noseda and others, and conducts concerts himself. He won second prize at the 12th Cadaqués Orchestra International Conducting Competition in Spain the year before. Both are among the most renowned competitions for young conductors. Since 2017, he has also been Conducting Fellow with the Dirigentenforum of the German Music Council and with the “Akademie Musiktheater heute” of the Deutsche Bank Foundation.

During the 2019/20 season, he will follow Paavo Järvi to the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich as Assistant Conductor. Prior to this, he was Assistant Conductor to Emmanuel Krivine at the Orchestre National de France in Paris for two years. Felix Mildenberger is currently Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Sinfonieorchester Crescendo Freiburg, which he co-founded in 2014.

Highlights of his 2019/20 season will include debuts with the Orchestre National de Lille, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Hamburger Camerata, the Ensemble Modern, the Aarhus Symfoniorkester, a concert as part of the Salzburger Mozartwoche 2020, as well as return engagements to the Filarmonica Teatro Regio Torino, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and the St. Petersburg State Capella Symphony Orchestra. In addition, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has renewed its invitation as Cover Conductor, following his collaboration with Bernard Haitink during the 2018/19 season, this time for Mariss Jansons.

He is currently working with many orchestras on a national and international scale. These include the Orchestre National de France and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as the hr-Sinfonieorchester, the Folkwang Kammerorchester Essen, the Nürnberger Symphoniker, the Bremer Philharmoniker, the Filarmonica Teatro Regio Torino, the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orquestra de Cadaqués, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and others. In September 2018, Felix Mildenberger acted as stand-in for Augustin Dumay at short notice to conduct a subscription concert with the Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra in Osaka, Japan.

Felix Mildenberger has been Assistant Conductor in an opera production at the Aspen Opera Center and he conducted concerts during the Impuls Festival for Contemporary Music in Magdeburg and Dessau. He was Conducting Fellow with the Aspen Music Festival in 2016/17, where he studied with Robert Spano, Markus Stenz, Hugh Wolff, Michael Stern, Patrick Summers, Larry Rachleff, Johannes Debus und Federico Cortese, and was awarded the „Robert Spano Conductor Prize“.

Born in Germany in 1990, Felix Mildenberger received his first music education in violin, viola and piano, then going on to study conducting in Freiburg and Vienna from 2011 to 2015. Among his teachers were Prof. Lutz Koehler HonRAM, Prof. Mark Stringer, Gerhard Markson, Prof. Scott Sandmeier, Massimiliano Matesic and Alexander Burda. He additionally studied with Bernard Haitink, Paavo Järvi, David Zinman, Neeme Järvi, Prof. Johannes Schlaefli, Prof. Nicolás Pasquet, James E. Ross and others in master classes, as well as with John Carewe, Gabriel Feltz, Oliver Weder and Marc Piollet during the course of his „Dirigentenforum“ fellowship. From 2015 to 2017 he lectured in orchestral conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.