studied the clarinet, singing, and composition at the Milan Conservatoire with Sandro Gorli, and continued his postgraduate studies at the Philharmonic Society of St. Petersburg. His other teachers included Benjamin Zander and János Fürst in London and Erwin Acel in Vienna. In 2010 he was a finalist for the position of assistant conductor at Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris, making his conducting debut the same year with the La Fenice orchestra for the opening of the Music Biennale in Venice. He returned to conduct the same orchestra in 2011 for the event’s closing concert with a programme dedicated to Nono and Stravinsky. He was assistant to Mauricio Kagel in Venice and Buenos Aires, and conducted the Italian premiere of his opera Mare nostrum in Milan as well as Variété at the Teatro Olimpico in Rome.
He specialises in the contemporary repertoire and the latest experiments in musical theatre, particularly in twentieth-century German music. He has premiered a large number of works, including the monumental Mise en abîme (2010) and GARON (2011) by Israeli composer Yuval Avital. With the Secret Theatre Ensemble, of which he was one of the founders, he directed the first performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Chamber Symphony op. 9 at the Fadjr Festival in Tehran, in a programme devoted to composers discriminated against by the Nazis: Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Eisler, a huge success with audiences and critics, judged as one of the best performances of the festival.
Dario Garegnani has worked with institutions such as Turin’s Teatro Piccolo Regio, Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, and Milan’s MITO Festival. As a conductor, he has published a CD dedicated to Fulvio Delli Pizzi (Chamber Music, 2008) and another for Brilliant Classics dedicated to Giovanni Albini (Musica ciclica, 2013). He is also a leading expert on the musical theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth century, to which he dedicated his master’s thesis in musicology.