Principal Guest Conductor Donald Runnicles is currently in his ninth year partnership with Music Director Robert Spano in leading the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. One of today’s most consistently acclaimed conductors of both opera and symphonic repertoire, Mr. Runnicles has been Music Director and Principal Conductor of the San Francisco Opera since 1992, and is Music Director of the Grand Teton Music Festival. In 2009, he became General Music Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Orchestra.

Mr. Runnicles’s acclaimed recordings with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra include a concert disc with soprano Christine Brewer singing Strauss and Wagner, and a new Strauss disc recorded live in Atlanta Symphony Hall. With the ASO, Mr. Runnicles has also recorded the Mozart Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony¸ and a Brittania album. In December 2003 Mr. Runnicles and the ASO Chorus made their debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in Britten’s War Requiem. Following the performance, Der Tagesspiegel wrote: “The world has really turned a bit topsy-turvy when our fabulous Berliner Philharmoniker turn around in their orchestra seats to applaud an American amateur chorus.” Mr. Runnicles and the ASO Chorus performed the Berlioz Requiem with the German orchestra in May 2008, and most recently, in December 2009, Mr. Runnicles and the Chorus performed Brahms’s A German Requiem, sung in German.

Mr. Runnicles has ongoing musical relationships with today’s finest orchestras and opera companies. Among the more than 60 productions he has conducted at San Francisco Opera was the 2005 world premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic.