Michele Carulli was educated as an instrumentalist in his native province of Apulia. He went on to get the diploma with honours at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. He then became the solo clarinettist at the age of 19 in the orchestra of La Scala in Milan, a position to which he was recommended by Claudio Abbado. He began at the same time to study composition and orchestral conducting at the Milan Conservatory. He followed this with attendance at master classes for young conductors at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese (with Donato Renzetti), the Scuola di Perfezionamento di Saluzzo (with Aldo Ceccato), the Teatro La Fenice (with Emil Tchakarov), and the Brahms Musikschule in Mürzzuschlag, Vienna (with Richard Schumacher).
After his Italian debut, Carulli’s conducting engagements took him to Austria, Hungary, and the United States. He was one of the finalists in the 1991 International Conducting Competition at Berlin. Invited by Seiji Ozawa, he participated the following year in seminars at Tanglewood and also studied there with Ozawa.
As personal assistant to Giuseppe Sinopoli, Michele Carulli worked from 1994 in preparing important productions at the Scala in Milan, the Semper Opera in Dresden, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Maggio Musicale in Florence, and the Accademia Musicale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In the summer of 2000 he was Assistant for the new production of the Ring of the Nibelung at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth which was conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli and directed by Jürgen Flimm.
Carulli was the regular assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of RAI in Turin from 1996 to 1998, and prepared and conducted numerous concerts with the orchestra. As the Associate Music Director of the Rome Opera during the 1998/1999 season, he conducted several concerts and operas.
Among the orchestras that Carulli has conducted are the Munich Radio Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, the Saarbrücken Radio Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of Teatro La Fenice of Venice, the Tuscany Orchestra, the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra, the State Orchestra of Weimar, the Robert Schumann Philharmonic Orchestra of Chemnitz, the State Symphony Orchestra of Rhineland-Palatinate, the Berne Symphony Orchestra, the Ensemble Kanazawa, and the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also conducted operas at the Teatro San Carlo at Naples, the National Theatre in Weimar, the State Theatre in Prague, the Koblenz Theatre, the State Theatre of Tyrol in Innsbruck, the State Theatre of Nürnberg and the City Theatre in St. Gallen.
Michele Carulli was the principal conductor and associate general music director at the State Theatre in Saarbrücken from 2002 to 2005.
Beginning with the 2005/2006 season, Michele Carulli has been the General Music Director of the State Theatre of Saxony in Dresden, with the responsibility for their opera productions and symphony concerts. In November 2006 he has been as guest conductor at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, with a new production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Carulli has recorded, with the pianist Sandro Bartoli and the Radio-Symphony Orchestra of Saarbrücken, all six piano concertos of Gian Francesco Malipiero, and the resulting CD-box has appeared in August 2007.