Oleg Ptashnikov

Oleg Ptashnikov was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He completed his studies at the Gnessin State Musical College in Moscow with diplomas in piano performance under Oleg Boshnjakovich and musicology under Natalia Guljanitskaya in 1995. During his studies, he already worked as a répétiteur, conductor, arranger, and composer at various Moscow theaters.

In Germany, he pursued postgraduate studies in piano at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich with Olaf Dreßler and in orchestral conducting with Ekkehard Klemm at the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music in Dresden. Since the 2002/03 season, Oleg Ptashnikov has been a conductor at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, where he has conducted over 500 performances of more than 70 different productions, ranging from Mozart to Henze.

As a guest conductor, he has led the Munich Radio Orchestra, the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. From 2014 to 2019, Oleg Ptashnikov was the musical assistant to Mariss Jansons, including for Salzburg Festival productions of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame. He made his debut at the 2024 Salzburg Summer Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducting the opera The Idiot by M. Weinberg.