Carlo Montanaro is an Italian conductor.  He first began his career in 1991 as a professional violinist playing with the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale in Fierenze, performing all the opera repertoire and with many leading conductors including Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Carlo Maria Giulini, Georges Prêtre, Seiji Ozawa, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Lorin Maazel, Wolfgang Sawallisch.

Since 2001, Montanaro has conducted opera and concerts in all the major worldwide venues, and has debuted and been reinvented for productions for La Scala, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Frankfurt Opera, Semperoper Dresden, Opera Tel Aviv, Opéra Bastille in Paris, Opéra de Monte-Carol, San Francisco Opera, Korean National Opera, Canadian Opera, Seattle Opera, Melbourne Opera, Dallas Opera, Opéra de Montréal, Hamburgische Staatsoper, as well as the houses of Sydney Opera, Megaron in Athens, Verona, Warsaw, Bilbao, Teatro Coumnale di Firenze, Cincinnati, Budapest, Mariinsky, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Oviedo.  Carlo was also Music Director at Teatr Wielki in Warsaw from 2011 to 2014. 

In concert he has led performances for Festival Verdi (Parma), Hercules Halle in Munich with Weimar Staatskapelle, at the Musikverein in Graz, and for Boston Symphony, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Santa Cecilia in Rome, Hungarian National Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Hungarian National Philharminic, Teatro Regio di Parma, as well as the Gala Klangvokal Music Festival in Dortmund, among various others.

Carlo worked with singers such as Luciano Pavarotti, Jonas Kaufmann, Renato Bruson, Anja Harterjos, Mariella Devia, Giuseppe Giacomini, Samuel Ramey, René Pape, Dolora Zajick as well as soloists Pinchas Zukerman, Sarah Chang, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet among others

Future engagements include L’Elisir d’Amore at Seattle Opera, Onegin and Lucrezia Borgia with Opera Australia, a new production of Fedora at Oper Frankfurt, as well as concerts with Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Carlo Montanaro was discovered by Zubin Mehta, who recommended him to the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, where he studied under Leopold Hager, Erwin Acél and Yugi Yuasa.  With over 50 operas and a long list of symphonic scores in his repertoire, his conducting teaching is committed to creating the next wave of young opera conductors with the highest level musicianship, mental preparation, and physical eloquence. Part of his teaching includes introducing students to the conducting technique of Hideo Saito, who was Seiji Ozawa’s conducting teacher.