Principal Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of the Rai
Appointed General Music Director of the City of Cologne and Director of the Gürzenich Orchestra (from 2025-2026).
Energy, elegance, and spirit – these are the qualities that particularly distinguish Andrés Orozco-Estrada as a musician. Following a wonderful collaboration with the National Symphony Orchestra of the Rai in May 2022, Andrés Orozco-Estrada has been appointed principal conductor of the Rai Orchestra from the 2023-2024 season.
From the 2025-2026 season, he will take up the position of General Music Director of the City of Cologne and Director of the Gürzenich Orchestra. Orozco-Estrada attaches great importance to inspiring all the people of Cologne with and for music and to representing and presenting Cologne as a city of music on an international scale. Already in the coming season, he will be invited to the Cologne Philharmonic with a special concert.
Premieres and repeated invitations in the 2023-2024 season will lead him to work, among others, with orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, the Swedish Radio Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. He will also return to the HR-Sinfonieorchester (Principal Conductor 2014-2021) and the Houston Symphony Orchestra (Music Director 2014-2022).
He will accompany the SWR Symphony Orchestra on its tour of Spain and also on the tour of the Filarmonica della Scala. Another important event will be the European tour with the Youth Philharmonic of Colombia and the violinist Hilary Hahn, which will take him to Paris, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Dortmund and Switzerland, among other places.
He will make his debut at the Scala in Milan (NP, Mozart “Figaro”) and at the Amsterdam Opera (NP Beethoven “Fidelio”) where he will conduct the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Orozco-Estrada will also return to the Berlin Opera after his several successful productions with a double performance of “Tosca”.
Born in Medellín (Colombia), Andrés Orozco-Estrada began his musical education playing the violin and received his first conducting lessons at the age of 15. In 1997 he moved to Vienna where he was admitted to the conducting class of Uroš Lajovic, a student of the legendary Hans Swarowsky, at the distinguished University of Music and Performing Arts. Since October 2022, Orozco-Estrada has been a professor of orchestra conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.