Oleg Caetani

Who is Oleg Caetani?

Oleg Caetani is an Italian conductor.

He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of the Ukrainian conductor Igor Markevitch and his second wife Donna Topazia Caetani, who is descended from a Roman family that included the early 14th-century Pope Boniface VIII. Caetani has chosen to use his mother's family name to continue its lineage. His half-brother is Vaslav Markevitch.

Caetani studied with Nadia Boulanger for several years. At the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, he studied conducting with Franco Ferrara and composition with Irma Ravinale. He made his debut at age 17 with a production of Claudio Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in Rome. He then went to the Moscow Conservatory to study conducting with Kirill Kondrashin and musicology with Nadezhda Nikolaeva. He graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory in conducting with Ilya Musin.

Caetani won the RAI Turin and the third prize at the Karajan Competitions in Berlin, and started his professional career as assistant to Otmar Suitner at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. He has since been Chief Conductor at the Nationaltheater Weimar, First Conductor at the Oper Frankfurt, Music Director first at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, later at the Chemnitz Opera House and of the Robert Schumann Philharmonic Orchestra.