François-Xavier Roth

François-Xavier Roth (born 6 November 1971 in Paris) is a French conductor. His father is the organist Daniel Roth. His brother Vincent Roth is a violist. Before turning to conducting, François was a flautist. Roth graduated from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, where his teachers included Alain Marion and János Fürst.

In 2000, Roth won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, which led to a 2-year appointment as Assistant Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. He has also served as an assistant conductor to John Eliot Gardiner. In 2003, he founded Les Siècles, an orchestra which performs on instruments appropriate to the period of composition of each piece. With Les Siècles, he has given concerts in France, Italy, Germany, England and Japan. To mark the centenary of The Rite of Spring in 2013, the orchestra performed the work on period instruments at the BBC Proms and the Alte Oper, Frankfurt. Roth and Les Siècles have devised their own television series for France 2 entitled Presto!, which ran for 3 years and garnered audiences of over three million viewers.

Roth was Associate Guest Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (BBC NOW) from 2008 to 2012. He was Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège (OPL) for the 2009-2010 season. In September 2011, Roth became Principal Conductor of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg. In February 2014, the orchestra announced the extension of Xavier-Roth's SWR orchestra contract through the 2015-2016 season. In the same month, February 2014, the city of Cologne announced the appointment of Roth as its next Generalmusikdirektor (GMD), which includes duties as Gürzenich-Kapellmeister and chief conductor of the Cologne Opera, effective 1 September 2015, with an initial contract of 5 years.

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