"An exciting and vital performance which all lovers of opera will want to hear, whatever the price." The Scotsman, reviewing the Naxos recording of Gluck's Alceste conducted by Arnold Ostman.
Between 1979 and 1992, Arnold Östman was Artistic Director of the famous Drottningholm Court Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden.
There, he introduced the practice of performing classical operas on period instruments, beginning with the Prague version of Don Giovanni.
Outside Sweden, he has conducted a wide repertoire at opera houses in London (Covent Garden), Vienna, Parma, Paris, Trieste, Cologne, Bonn, Toulouse, Nice, Wexford, Madrid, Washington, Lausanne, Paris Bastille and the Schwetzingen and Vienna Festivals, amongst others.
As a conductor of symphonic works, Arnold Östman works with many major European orchestras, including the German Radio Orchestras in Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart and Baden-Baden, with the Stuttgart Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Tonkünstler Orchestra of Vienna, The Academy of Ancient Music, the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, the Geneva Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Freiburg Baroque Orchester and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.
In the summer of 1998 he returned as a guest conductor to the Royal Court Theatre of Drottningholm for a Gluck cycle. In the summer of 1999 he was there to conduct Mozazt's Il Re Pastore and in 2000 he conducted a new production of Cosí Fan Tutte.
Some of the fruits of Arnold Ostman's association with the Royal Court Theatre of Drottningholm have been captured on the Naxos release of Gluck's Alceste. Opera magazine called the recording "an invaluable addition to the still-slim Gluck discography" whilst for the UK's popular Classic FM it was "Pick of the Year".
November, 2001
