Marzena Diakun

Biography

From September 2021, Marzena Diakun is Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Orquestra de la Comunidad de Madrid (ORCAM) and Chief Conductor of the Orchestre Symphonique de l’Opéra de Toulon. She came to international attention in 2016 following several concerts with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and is a former recipient of both the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Conducting Fellowship and a Taki Concordia Fellowship.

Recent engagements have taken Marzena to the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra Katowice, the Warsaw Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias, Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, Orchestre National de Lyon, Orquestra Sinfónica do Estado de São Paulo, Deutsche-Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, the National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Lubljana, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and the Gothenburg Opera.

Marzena is a dedicated exponent of contemporary music and has given the first performances of numerous works with both Smash Ensemble (Spain) and the Berg Orchestra (Czech Republic). In 2016, she gave the Polish premiere of Olga Neuwirth's opera Lost Highway and has worked with both Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Amsterdam-based Asko-Schönberg. Among the soloists she has collaborated are Martin Grubinger, Peter Jablonski, Andreas Staier, Ewa Kupiec, Truls Mørk, Daniel Müller-Schott, Camilla Nylund, Klaus Florian Vogt, Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Nathalie Stutzmann.

Marzena studied conducting under Mieczysław Gawronski at the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music in Wrocław and completed postgraduate studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. She has been mentored by conductors including Kurt Masur, Andrey Boreyko and Pierre Boulez and has been a finalist in the Lutosławski Conducting Competition and a semi-finalist in both the Donatella Flick Conductors Competition in London and Quadaques Competition in Barcelona. She is currently a conducting professor at the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music in Wrocław.

Marzena has received the Kreatywni Wrocławia award and in 2015 was nominated for the Wrocław Music Award. She was named Artist of the Year in 2013 and was awarded the Koszalin Eagle award.