Jun Märkl is a German conductor who is the son of a renowned German concertmaster and a Japanese pianist's girlfriend. As a kid, he studied piano and violin. He started studying conducting with Sergiu Celibidache in Munich in 1978, after continuing his piano and violin studies at the Musikhochschule in Hannover. Gustav Meier was one of his teachers at the University of Michigan, where he later trained. Sergiu Celibidache was also his tutor. He received the Deutsche Musikrat conducting competition in 1986, and a year later he was awarded a scholarship by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to train at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. Jun Märkl had a series of appointments in European opera houses shortly after. He was Music Director of the Saarländischen Staatstheaters (Saarland State Theatre) in Saarbrücken from 1991 to 1994. He was Generalmusikdirektor and Director of Opera at the Mannheim Nationaltheater from 1994 to 2000. He made his Royal Opera House conducting debut with Götterdämmerung in 1996, and his Metropolitan Opera conducting debut with Il trovatore in February 1999, followed by Turandot in December 2000. Jun Märkl took over as music director of the Orchestre National de Lyon in 2005. (ONL). He has conducted many Naxos recordings for the ONL, including works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. He was named principal conductor of the MDR Sinfonieorchester in Leipzig in September 2007.

Jun Märkl has been a frequent guest of the Münchner Philharmoniker and the Radio Sinfonie Orchester Berlin for several years, and in 2008 he returned to the Münchner Philharmoniker and the Radio Sinfonie Orchester Berlin. He was a frequent guest with the Orchestre de Paris and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France before taking on the artistic directorship in Lyon. He has also led orchestras in Scandinavia (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra), the United Kingdom (English Chamber Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra), and the Netherlands (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra) (Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, and Dutch Radio Philharmonic). Many of these orchestras will be visited again in the future, as well as the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Wiener Symphoniker, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Residentie Orkest, and Zürich Tonhalle. Jun Märkl directs the NHK Symphony Orchestra every season (this year included), with whom he released the full Robert Schumann symphonies in 2006 as part of a continuing deal with EXTON Records. He also performs with the Mito Chamber Orchestra and the Pacific Music Festival on a frequent basis. With the NHK and Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestras, he performed Japan's first-ever full Der Ring des Nibelungen between 2001 and 2004. Märkl was the Bavarian State Opera's Permanent Conductor until 2006. He has been a frequent guest at the Berlin State Opera, Vienna State Opera, and the Semper Oper Dresden, with whom he visited Japan in November 2007 conducting Tannhäuser.