Ivan Repušić

With a long record of conducting Croatia's top opera companies and orchestras, Ivan Repušić has increasingly often been heard in top German opera houses. He is also a noted educator. Repušić was born in the small town of Imotski, in southern Croatia's Dalmatia region, in 1978. He studied music from a young age, attending the Blagoje Bersa Music School in the city of Zadar. Repušić went on to the Academy of Music at the University of Zagreb, working with Igor Gjadrov and Vjekoslav Sutej. He took further conducting lessons with Jorma Panula and Gianluigi Gelmetti and did apprenticeships as an assistant to Kazushi Ono at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe and to Donald Runnicles at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Even before turning 20, he landed a position as conductor of the Oratory Choir of the Church of St. Marka Cantores Sancti Marci in Zagreb. In 2002, he began to land guest conducting positions, and from 2006 to 2008, he was the music director of the Opera of the Croatian National Theater in Split, leading performances of core Italian opera repertory. From 2006 to 2012, he was the director of two of Croatia's prominent summer festivals, the Split Summer Festival (2006-2009) and then the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. Repušić became Kapellmeister of Germany's Hanover State Opera in 2010, leading performances of major German operas, and in 2012, he assumed the same position at the Staatsoper Berlin. Repušić has had a notable career as an orchestral conductor as well, serving since 2005 as the conductor of the Zadar Chamber Orchestra. As a guest, he has led all the major Croatian orchestras, as well as the Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra in Milan, the Prague Symphony Orchestra, and the Slovenian Philharmonic, among others. He has also had an ongoing relationship with the Munich Radio Orchestra, and he was named chief conductor of that group in 2016. He is also the permanent guest conductor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. With that group, Repušić has made several recordings on the BR Klassik label, including Fuoco di Gioia!: Berühmte Opernchöre in 2019. That year, he backed Emmanuel Pahud in a flute recital on Warner Classics. Repušić remained active on recordings through the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the Munich Radio Orchestra on BR Klassik in a recording of Verdi's rarely heard Attila (2020), a pair of albums of music by Peteris Vasks, and, in 2023, a recording of the Johannespassion of composer Damijan Močnik. Repušić has been a member of the faculty at the Academy of Arts of the University of Split since 2016. ~ James Manheim, Rovi