Jüri Alperten

Biography

Jüri Alperten has graduated from Tallinn Conservatory in 1979 (the piano class of Bruno Lukk) and has studied conducting with Prof. Ilja Mussin at the N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory (1985). He has been the conductor of the Estonian National Opera since 1985, the chief conductor in 2002–04, the chief conductor of the Estonian Music and Theatre Academy SO in 1994–2000 and the chief conductor of the Pärnu City Orchestra since 1998. He teaches conducting at the Estonian Academy of Music since 1993.

He has worked with many outstanding orchestras such as Hungarian Radio Orchestra, Sombathely Philharmonic Orchestra, several Finnish orchestras, Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, etc. He has given guest performances in Russia, Hungary, Finland, Latvia, Sweden etc. He has conducted operas, operettas and ballets, altogether more than forty different performances.

He has been a guest conductor at the Latvian National Opera, Göteborg Opera in Sweden etc. At the Estonian National Opera Jüri Alpreten has been the music director for numerous performances: Edur’s/Aints’ Catherine I, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Bizet-Shtshedrin’s Carmen, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, Shchedrin’s Anna Karenina, La dame aux camellias by Tiit Härm, Hynd’s Rosalinde; operas and operettas: La vida breve by de Falla, Der Freischütz by Weber, Die Fledermaus by Strauss, Leigh’s Man of La Mancha, Bock’s Fiddler on the Roof etc. In 2012 he won the Harjumaa Theatre Prize, in 2014 the Johann Voldemar Jannsen Prize and the Estonian Music Council’s Interpretation Prize.