Conductor Jakub Hrůša aims to balance his work in opera and concert realms

For Jakub Hrůša, opera is the highest calling for a conductor. “The genre, when it is done well, is the peak of what one as a musician can do,” he said.

Accordingly, the Czech-born conductor, now 43, jumped at the chance to become music director of the Royal Opera House in London, an appointment that was announced in October 2022. He will take over the reins in September 2025. He was named the 2023 Opus Klassik Conductor of the Year.

His recording of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova with the Vienna State Opera and Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic  and vocal soloists Jens Larsen, David Butt Philip, Evelyn Herlitzius, Jaroslav Březina, Corinne Winters, Benjamin Hulett, Jarmila Balážová and Michael Mofidian won the 2024 Gramophone Award for best opera. Hrůša also won Gramophone’s 2024 best concerto honors for Britten’s Violin Concerto and Chamber Works featuring Isabelle Faust (violin), Alexander Melnikov (piano), Boris Faust (viola) and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

As much as Hrůša admires opera, he thinks too often artistic, technical or financial compromises diminish the final product onstage. “It’s not easy to do it really on a top level even in the great metropolises of the opera world,” he said. But the Royal Opera House, where he conducted Carmen in 2018 and Lohengrin in 2022, stands as a shining exception, a place where the artistic working conditions are “fantastic.”

“There is a huge tradition and love of opera in the whole community,” he said. “But there is also an extreme care about the result, about the details and the whole scale. There is freshness of artistic work there, and what I have experienced is an absolute top level of execution.”

It also helps that he loves London, where he previously served as guest conductor of the Philharmonia, and maintains his principal residence.

But as devoted as Hrůša is to opera, he is also committed to keeping a balance in his professional life between that genre and the symphonic world. Hrůša spoke from Vienna, where he was preparing to lead the Vienna Philharmonic on a four-concert tour of Europe. He returns March 20-22 to Symphony Center to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Simon Trpčeski and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 (The Year 1905).

“Some people have said that I have been a more frequent presence on the concert stage, which might be the case occasionally,” Hrůša said. “But I always answer that it’s not because I find or would ever have found the concert stage somehow more important than theater work, but because I have found it a little easier in the past to achieve the fantastic quality of what musical achievement can be like on a concert stage. In general, there is a little more attunement and connection to the minute details of artistic result [in the symphonic world].”

Hrůša took over as music director of the Bamberg Symphony in 2016, and his contract there has been extended through the 2025-26 season. He also serves as principal guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. Asked if he was planning to relinquish some of those posts, given his future responsibilities at the Royal House, he said he would, of course, honor his contractual obligations in Bamberg. Beyond that, discussions are under way regarding his future with all three ensembles.

“I think it is more than likely, bordering on certainty, that I would continue in Prague, because my relationship with the Czech audience, where I come from and where I owe everyone, if nothing more, gratefulness for my beginnings and where the audiences are just splendid and the culture of listening to classical music is very high,” Hrůša said. “I would definitely stay there.” 

A version of this article appeared previously on Experience CSO.