Facundo Agudin

Facundo Agudin is a Swiss-Argentine conductor and artistic curator whose work is rooted in the cultural landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean. Living between Tirana and the Swiss Jura, he develops international artistic projects that bridge musical heritage, contemporary creation and the humanities, creating frameworks for encounter where repertoire, artists and audiences engage in dialogue across cultures.

After studying orchestral conducting at the Universidad Católica Argentina in Buenos Aires, he pursued advanced studies in medieval music with Pedro Memelsdorff in Bologna and at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. His musical imagination was further shaped by six years with the Swiss Chamber Choir, working with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich under Claudio Abbado, Valery Gergiev, Armin Jordan and Sir Simon Rattle. In 2007 he won First Prize at the Colin Metters conducting seminar with the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra.

Founder and artistic director of Musique des Lumières, he has spent two decades shaping the ensemble’s identity as an orchestra of ideas, where historical awareness, artistic innovation and interdisciplinary dialogue converge. He is also music director of the Albanian Radio Television Symphony Orchestra (RTSH) and of the Basler Gesangverein, and works closely with the Armenian National Opera, where he conducts new productions of Turandot and Carmen in the 2026/27 season.

He has appeared at the George Enescu Festival, the Ljubljana Festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Grand Théâtre de Genève, where he conducted Daniele Finzi Pasca’s production of Piazzolla’s María de Buenos Aires in 2023, and conducted Gounod’s Faust at the Mariinsky Theatre in 2014 and 2015. He has worked with artists including Ramón Vargas, Kent Nagano, Giuliano Carmignola, Sara Mingardo and Philippe Bianconi, and with orchestras including the Prague Chamber Orchestra, the Sinfonieorchester Basel, the Kammerorchester Basel, the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina.

A committed advocate of new music, he has given more than fifty world premieres and commissions new works, and curates interdisciplinary productions that connect music with literature, history and contemporary thought, including the Nuevo Tango Nuevo and Music & Words series and the Flight of Patagonian Bees platform. With Musique des Lumières he has recorded for Swiss Radio SRF, NEOS, Oehms Classics and IBS Classical, including Bach Mirror and Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis.

Dedicated to teaching young conductors, he has led conducting programmes in Switzerland, Argentina and Venezuela. In Argentina he was awarded the Konex Prize as Conductor of the Decade (2010–2019).