Michael Christie

The American Michael Christie has emerged as a force for innovation among the younger generation of conductors, with a career that in the 2010s has focused on contemporary opera. Christie was born in Buffalo, New York, on June 30, 1974. He is apparently unrelated to fellow conductor and Buffalo native William Christie. Christie attended the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, majoring in trumpet performance, but he switched to conducting after lessons with Robert Spano, Eiji Oue, and others, and his career choice was confirmed when he won a special prize for outstanding potential at the First International Sibelius Conducting Competition in Helsinki in 1995, when he was just 21. Christie landed an apprenticeship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the following year, benefiting from training by Daniel Barenboim both in Chicago and, in his first major exposure to opera, at the Berlin State Opera. After associate and assistant stints with the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Zurich Opera in the late 1990s, he was appointed music director of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in Australia from 2001 to 2004, and he has continued to be a visible figure in Australian music. Christie became music director of the Phoenix Symphony in 2004 and of the Brooklyn Philharmonic the following year. At both institutions he pursued innovative programming, championing such composers as Osvaldo Golijov and Michael Daugherty; in Phoenix he faced labor trouble as he dismissed older players, but he was backed by the orchestra's management, serving a respectable eight years and recording music of Mark Grey with the orchestra for the Naxos label. He conducted the New York Philharmonic in 2007, filling in on short notice for an ailing Riccardo Muti -- Christie has been able to accept such last-minute gigs because he flies to them in his own single-engine plane; he also volunteers for the organization Angel Flight Central. Christie became music director of the Minnesota Opera for the 2012-2013 season, remaining there through 2018. He has also conducted operas with other major companies including the San Francisco Opera and, in 2016-2017, the Santa Fe Opera, in a performance of Mason Bates' The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs that was recorded for the Pentatone label in the Netherlands. Christie also led the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in Ricky Ian Gordon's 27: An Opera in Five Acts; that performance, too, was recorded and released on Albany Records.
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