Martin Rajna has become one of the most outstanding young conductors emerging from Hungary in recent years. He is the newly appointed music director of the Luxembourg Philharmonic, principal conductor of the Hungarian State Opera, and co-artistic director of the Wagner Days at Müpa Budapest sharing this position with Adam Fischer. Between 2021 and 2025 Martin Rajna was chief conductor of the Győr Philharmonic Orchestra.
In the 2026/27 season, Rajna will embark on his music directorship in Luxembourg conducting concerts through the season in Luxembourg, as well as taking the orchestra on a European and a South American tour. He will also continue to make more European debuts with the Weimar Staatskapelle, the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, and leading the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra on a tour of Spain. At the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest, he will lead new productions of Il Trovatore and Salome and conduct La Boheme. For the Budapest Wagner Days, he will direct Der fliegende Holländer.
In previous seasons, Rajna has conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of Teatro La Fenice, the Netherlands Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Sinfonia Varsovia, the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, the Nürnberg Symphony Orchestra, the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester and the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra of Slovenia.
At the Hungarian State Opera, which engaged him in 2021, he has recently been on the podium for Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, Aida, Attila, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Macbeth, Turandot, Die Fledermaus, Maria Stuarda, L’Italiana in Algeri, Entführung aus dem Serail and Don Giovanni. In July 2025, he conducted in the Tyrol Festival in Erl (Austria) a new production of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Poulenc’s La Voix humaine, both directed by Claus Guth. He also appeared with the same production at the Teatro Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in March 2026.
Rajna’s previous awards include a scholarship in 2022 to participate in the Forum Dirigieren programme of the German Music Council, and he was also selected by the Lucerne Festival Academy for a Conducting Fellowship wherein his mentor was Thomas Adès. In 2018, he won Hungary’s Junior Prima Award and in 2023 he was the winner of the György Cziffra Festival Talent Prize.
Martin Rajna graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied with Ádám Medveczky and András Ligeti and furthered his training at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar under conductors Nicolás Pasquet and Ekhart Wycik. In 2021 he was selected to participate in the mentoring programme of the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation, where he worked with such masters as Péter Eötvös, György Kurtág, Fabián Panisello and Magnus Lindberg.
