Belarusian conductor Vitali Alekseenok has received international attention after winning the Arturo Toscanini Conducting Competition 2021 in Parma, Italy. In addition to the first prize, he won the audience award, the prize for the best performance of a Verdi opera, as well as other prizes and engagements.
Since the 2022/23 season Vitali Alekseenok has been working as Kapellmeister at Deutsche Oper am Rhein (Düsseldorf, Germany). This season he conducts there such operas as Tosca, Hänsel und Gretel, Die Zauberflöte as well as his own production of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Among the highlights of this season as a guest conductor Vitali makes his debut at the Teatro alla Scala with his own production of the opera "Il Piccolo Principe" (world premiere), the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, the Rossini Festival in Pesaro as well as symphony concerts with orchestras of the Arena di Verona, Teatro Bellini Catania and others.
In previous seasons, Vitali Alekseenok has conducted such orchestras as the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, MDR Radio Symphony Orchestra Leipzig, the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, the Staatskapelle Weimar, the Lucerne Festival Strings, the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, the Toscanini Orchestra in Parma, the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, the Karlovy Vary Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonic Orchestras Hradec Kralove, Lviv, Jena among others.
As an opera conductor, Vitali Alekseenok conducted the first Ukrainian performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the National Opera of Ukraine in autumn 2021 and has worked in Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Graz Opera, Odessa National Opera House, Teatro Bellini Catania, Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, Opera Varna. He also conducted in 2018 a new production of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in the military region of Ukraine in Severodonetsk as part of the Music and Dialogue project.
Alekseenok is the founder and artistic director of the ensemble paradigme, which performs works by 20th and 21st century composers, such as Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Paweł Szymański, Anton von Webern, Jörn Arnecke, as well as world premieres by composers from the more recent generation.
Vitali Alekseenok has worked as an assistant to Oksana Lyniv, Lothar Zagrosek and Maurizio Barbaccini, and has taken part in masterclasses with Bernard Haitink, Fabio Luisi, Jorma Panula, Ricardo Muti and others. He received his conductor's education at the St Petersburg State Conservatoire (Prof. Alexander Alekseev) and the Weimar School of Music (Prof. Nicolas Pasquet, Ekhart Wycik, Gunter Kahlert).
Vitali Alekseenok is actively engaged in pedagogical activities: he was principal conductor of the Orchestra of the University of Munich in the 2017-22 seasons. He has given presentations at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Vitali held educational projects in Western and Eastern Europe, and conducted numerous youth orchestras in Germany, Italy, Poland and Ukraine. Since the 2020/21 season he has been working at the University of Music in Frankfurt am Main.
Vitali Alekseenok is the author of the book The White Days of Minsk and has written articles and essays for Tagesspiegel, Neue Rundschau Frankfurt, Religion & Gesellscaft Zürich, among others.
In June 2021 Vitali Alekseenok became the new Artistic Director of the Ukrainian Festival Kharkiv Music Fest which has held numerous concerts in bomb shelters, subways and hospitals in Kharkiv during the war.