Omer Arieli

Trained in Florence — violin, piano, composition and chamber music at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory — Omer Arieli took his conducting studies at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance with Mendi Rodan and in Vienna with Leopold Hager, Howard Arman, Erwin Ortner and Paul Gulda. The years that followed were spent in the engine room of opera houses: répétiteur, assistant and conductor at the Vienna Volksoper and the Vienna State Opera, the Mainfranken Theater in Würzburg, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Salzburg festivals and the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, where he assisted Riccardo Muti and Hager. On the podium he has led the American Symphony Orchestra, the Dortmund Philharmonic, the Sofia Philharmonic and most of the Israeli orchestras. From 2011 he has been music director of the Jerusalem Opera, and he teaches singer coaching and theoretical subjects at the academy that trained him. In Jerusalem his posts extend beyond the opera house to the Oratorio Choir, the Hovevei Hamusica Orchestra and the opera studio of the academy, where he holds a professorship; the Orchestra Maderna is among the other ensembles he has conducted. He spent the 1990s playing violin and piano across Italy, with work at the Arena di Verona and at the Estate Fiesolana and Puccini festivals, and he has been a rehearsal coach at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv.