Bar Avni

Israeli conductor Bar Avni is the 1st Prize winner of the La Maestra competition 2024 in Paris. In addition, she was awarded four special prizes.

At the beginning of 2021, Bar Avni has been appointed chief conductor of the Bayer Philharmonic Orchestra in Leverkusen, which was founded in 1904, the first female conductor in the history of the orchestra. She was also made a fellow of Bayer Kultur’s prestigious Start Academy at the same time.

Recent debuts include concerts with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Hamburg at the Elbphilharmonie, the Orchestra of the Staatskapelle Halle and the Philharmonie Halberstadt as part of the IMPULS Festival, and with the Israel Philharmonic at Charles Bronfman Hall, Tel Aviv.

Following a performance at the Yehudi Menuhin Festival’s Gstaad Conducting Academy with Jaap van Zweden and Johannes Schläflie in 2018, Avni was awarded the Neeme Järvi Prize and invited to return to the Academy with Manfred Honeck in 2019.

Her 2016 debut at the Tyrolean Festival Erl and following prize in the Fitelberg Conducting Competition Katowice, Poland had led to concerts with Sinfonia Varsovia and several other Polish orchestras. She has since worked with a wide breadth of orchestras, including the Israel chamber orchestra, Juventus Symphony Orchestra, Hamburger Symphony, Magdeburg Philharmonic and several others in Germany and Austria.

Bar Avni has led the successful production of the chamber opera “Simplicius Simplicissimus” by Karl A. Hartmann, a shortened version of the Opera Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell, and the German premiere of the Chinese short opera, based on the french film “L‘Accordeur”.

Bar Avni early career was performing as a classical percussionist in all the leading orchestras in Israel, and she is a student of Yoav Talmi, Martin Sieghart and Ulrich Windfuhr. She  worked as the assistant conductor of both the Israel Chamber Orchestra under Music Director Yoav Talmi, and the Bergische Symphoniker under Music Director Peter Kuhn in the 2017-18 season. There, she conducted and moderated many open-air and family concerts with great success. She returned to perform with the orchestra in the 2019-20 season.

Bar Avni is active in the music world beyond the realm of conducting. She was selected for the fellowship “The Future of the Orchestral Culture,” a German-American-Chinese collaboration that meets regularly with prominent figures in the music world to discuss the issues, visions, and attitudes that shape the world of orchestras in Europe and overseas.