Simon Gaudenz is a Swiss conductor. He studied in Lucerne, Graz, Freiburg, and Salzburg, and his areas of specialization were clarinet, composition, and conducting. Important mentors have included Leon Fleisher, Kurt Masur, David Zinman, and Eliahu Inbal, and his studies in historically informed performance practices were stimulated by Arnold Östman and Reinhard Goebel. He is the recipient of many prizes, among them the "Akademie Musiktheater heute-Deutsche Bank" Scholarship in 2005, and the first prize of the Gennady Rozhdestvensky International Conducting Competition in 2006. He was awarded the Swiss Aargauer Kuratorium Cultural Foundation’s Artist Prize three times, and in 2009, he won the "Deutscher Dirigentenpreis," the highest award of any European conducting competition. From 2004 to 2011, Gaudenz served as music director and chief conductor of the Collegium Musicum in Basel, and he became the principal guest conductor of the Odense Symphony Orchestra in 2010. He has also conducted the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, the Orchestre National de France, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, and the Sinfonieorchester Basel, among many other ensembles. He has recorded on Genuin, Bridge, and CPO. ~ Blair Sanderson, Rovi