György Gyõriványi Ráth has been in 2001-2002 General Music and Artistic Director of the Budapest State Opera.

Born in Budapest, where he began his musical studies on trumpet, piano and cello. Graduated at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music under Ervin Lukács; specialized with László Somogyi and Kurt Masur in Weimar.

Received the Leonard Bernstein Scholarship and participated in Franco Ferrara's master-classes at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena in 1984. Three year later he won the Georg Solti Scholarship and took part in the fellowship program of the Tanglewood Music Festival where he worked with Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Gennadij Rozhdestvenskij and Gustav Meier.

In 1986 he won third price as well as the Audience Prize at the 5th International Conductors Competition organized by the Hungarian Television. The same year he was also awarded the First Prize at the International Toscanini Competition held in Parma.

 Symphonic conducting has included, among others, the Berlin Radio Orchestra, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the RTL Orchestra in Luxembourg, the Royal Philharmonics of Flanders, the Orchestra Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Symphony Orchestra of Chile, the RAI Orchestra in Milano, the ORT in Firenze, the Orchestra Toscanini in Parma, Ljubljana Philharmonic, the Hungarian Radio Orchestra, the Budapest State Orchestra, the Budapest Philharmonic, Sophia Philharmonic, the Aukland Philharmonic in New Zealand, the Taipei City Symphony Orchestra.

György Gyõriványi Ráth has been First Guest Conductor of prestigious orchestras such as the RAI Symphony Orchestra in Torino, Zagreb Philharmonic, and of the Royal Symphony Orchestra in Sevilla, as well as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1988 he made his lyrical debut at the Budapest State Opera in La Traviata. This was followed by Otello and Die Zauberflöte.

In 1998 he made his debut at the Chicago Lyric Opera with Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito, acclaimed both by audience and critics. He also conducted Macbeth and Turandot at the Stuttgart Opera Theatre and Macbeth, Mefistofele and Puccini's Manon Lescaut at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.

His operatic performances in Italy have been Macbeth and Andrea Chénier at the Teatro dell'Opera in Roma, Turandot at the Carlo Felice in Genoa, The Bat at the Arena in Verona, Rigoletto at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, Le nozze di Figaro at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, La forza del destino at the Verdi Festival in Parma, and the latest, Nabucco at the Fenice in Venice.

In the 2005/2006 season he was conducting Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame and Puccini's Tosca at the Hamburg State Opera. He is giving concerts among others with the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the National Philharmonic Orchestra of the Italian Radio, the Verdi Orchestra of Milan and with the Orchestra of the Arena di Verona.

In 2006 he conducted the new production of Verdi's Rigoletto at the Mannheim National Theater, the revived Jenufa (Janacek) production and Simon Boccanegra (G. Verdi) at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany. In Budapest he conducted Saint-Saens's Samson and Dalila at the Jewish Summer Festival 2006, and W. A. Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Palace of Arts Béla Bartók National Concert Hall.