The Iranian conductor Hossein Pishkar won the prestigious Deutscher Dirigentenpreis in an international competition staged in cooperation with Cologne’s leading musical institutions and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in 2017. In the same year he also won the Ernst-von-Schuch-Preis, presented annually in collaboration with the Dirigentenforum.

Hossein Pishkar conducts, as guest conductor, the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovenska filharmonija, Staatsorchester Stuttgart and WDR-Sinfonieorchester. At the Royal Danish Opera he conducted the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet (director: Barrie Kosky), Verdi’s Aida (director: Annabel Arden), Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (director: Jetske Mijnssen) and Shostakovich’s The Nose (director: Àlex Ollé), at the Staatsoper Stuttgart Die Zauberflöte (director: Barrie Kosky) and at the Ravenna Festival Rigoletto (director: Cristina Mazzavillani Muti).

Before moving to Düsseldorf to study conducting with Rüdiger Bohn at the Robert Schumann Hochschule, Hossein Pishkar studied composition and piano in Teheran, where he was born in 1988. In Iran he has conducted the Teheran Youth Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Teheran Music School. He began playing traditional Persian music as a young child and has won many prizes as a player of the tar, the fretted stringed instrument of Persian culture.