Constantin Trinks

Conductor Constantin Trinks is among the operatic scene's prominent specialists in the music of Wagner and other German composers of the late Romantic and contemporary eras. He is notable in that, since 2012, he has taken engagements on a freelance basis, without a specific connection to an opera house. Trinks was born in Karlsruhe, then in West Germany, on April 9, 1975. He studied both piano and conducting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, working in the latter field with Wolf-Dieter Hauschild. He gravitated further toward conducting when he became the personal assistant to Kazushi Ono at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and he became music director at that theater himself in 2000. He studied further with Christian Thielemann at the Bayreuth Festival during a new staging of Wagner's Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival in 2002. That year, Trinks became the assistant music director at the Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken, and in 2006 he was named the acting general music director there. In 2009, Trinks moved to the position of general music director at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. He has been a freelancer since 2012, and his résumé of appearances has been exceptionally wide and deep considering that up to that point, his reputation was of a primarily regional nature, centered on southwestern Germany. Trinks has appeared at such venues as the New National Theater Tokyo, the Semperoper Dresden, and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He conducted not only the major repertory operas of Wagner in various locations but also, in 2013, Wagner's youthful and rarely performed Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), at Bayreuth. Over the 2010s, Trinks has expanded his repertory to other works, some of them non-German: not only Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, but also Halévy's La Juive (at the Staatsoper Hannover, 2019-2020) and Puccini's La bohème at the Cologne Opera (2019). Trinks also has a wide knowledge of 19th century concertos and has appeared with such orchestras as the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, the Vancouver Symphony, and the Salzburg Mozarteum. He has made recordings of German symphonic repertory, including one of the Symphony No. 1 of Hans Rott, for the Profil label, and in 2019, he joined pianist Markus Becker and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin for a recording featuring piano-and-orchestra works by Hans Pfitzner and Walter Braunfels.
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