Conductor Oleg Caetani, among the last students of Nadia Boulanger, has been equally active in operatic and symphonic repertory. His career has been marked by frequent moves from one organization to another.

Caetani was born October 5, 1956, in Lausanne, Switzerland. His upbringing was international. Caetani's father was conductor Igor Markevitch,who married an Italian woman, Donna Topazia Caetani. His first language was French, the language of Lausanne, but his mother had family connections in Brighton, England, and he spent time there as a child and learned to speak English fluently, as well as Russian, German, and Italian. He uses the name Caetani to further the lineage of his mother, descended from a Roman family that included Pope Boniface VIII in the 14th century. When Caetani was nine, he met the famed teacher Boulanger and studied in the summers at her Fontainebleau academy; she became a major influence. He attended school in the Pyrenees region of France and in Nice, studied at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, made his debut at 17 with Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, studied conducting with Franco Ferrara, and then attended the Moscow Conservatory for conducting studies with Kirill Kondrashin. After further studies with Ilya Musin, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Caetani won Italy's RAI Competition in 1979.

Two years later, Caetani made his major opera house debut at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in what was then East Berlin. He worked as an assistant to Otmar Suitner and held posts at the Nationaltheater Weimar, First Kapelllmeister at the Frankfurt Opera, and Robert Schumann-Philharmonie in Chemnitz, among others. In 1987, he made his recording debut with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 3, Op. 44. Caetani was one of few musicians during this period to move freely and successfully across the border between East and West Germany. He became music director of the English National Opera in 2002 and continued to appear frequently as a guest there even after departing as music director.

From 2005 to 2010, Caetani was music director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. However, he told Opera magazine, "I see my job as a luxury. I don’t believe I should have to make sacrifices for the sake of a career, but I do believe I have to enjoy my music and work hard on it. So when I hear that I should make this or that move in my career, or conduct an orchestra or a work I don’t like, in order to reach the next point in the strategy, it means nothing to me." Accordingly, he has worked mostly as a guest conductor and recording artist, issuing albums with a variety of groups, including the Melbourne Symphony, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, with which he recorded a complete cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies, and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, recording a set of Gounod symphonies with that group in 2014. Caetani resurfaced in 2022 backing violinist Charlie Siem in a recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, with the Philharmonia Orchestra. ~ James Manheim, Rovi