Christopher Važan is a Slovak-American conductor and pianist. During his studies in collaborative piano and orchestral conducting at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, which he completed with distinction in 2022, he worked as a répétiteur on a production of Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, featuring Gerald Finley and Rinat Shaham in the leading roles, under the baton of Marin Alsop.
In 2015, he took part in a concert tour of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States across seven cities as an assistant conductor and principal pianist under the direction of Charles Dutoit. In 2019, he attended Christian Thielemann’s conducting masterclass at the Bayreuth Festival. In the same year, he became a member of the Académie de l’Opéra national de Paris as a répétiteur, participating in productions at the Opéra Bastille and Palais Garnier, including Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. He also conducted the academy’s opening concert in the 2020–2021 season, featuring excerpts from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In 2020, he was awarded the Prix des Musiciens as a laureate of the academy’s musicians’ competition – with a jury chaired by Renaud Capuçon and Alexandre Tharaud – a prize awarded by the Fondation Signature in cooperation with the Institut de France. After completing his tenure at the academy, he returned to the Opéra national de Paris as a répétiteur for a production of Verdi’s La forza del destino. In June 2022, under Marin Alsop, he appeared as an orchestral pianist in John Adams’ City Noir – both in a recording at the Vienna RadioKulturhaus and in a concert at the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. In the summer of 2022, he collaborated at the Aspen Music Festival on a production of Verdi’s Falstaff under Patrick Summers, with Bryn Terfel in the title role.
From 2022 to 2024, he worked as a répétiteur with conducting duties at the Staatstheater Braunschweig, where he conducted performances of Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict and David T. Little’s Dog Days. Since the 2024–2025 season, he has been working as Second Conductor at the Staatstheater Meiningen. In the previous season, he conducted operas Madama Butterfly, Castor et Pollux, The Shipwrecked, A Precious Thing, and Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella. The production of Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers was named “Rediscovery of the Year 2025” by the German magazine Opernwelt. In the 2025–2026 season, he is conducting the premiere of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet in Meiningen, as well as performances of La Bohème, Die Csárdásfürstin, Cardillac, and the musical Jekyll & Hyde.