Biography

Joana Mallwitz

Current as of August 2022

Joana Mallwitz was voted Conductor of the Year in a poll of critics undertaken by Opernwelt magazine in 2019. At least since the time of her Salzburg Festival debut with Così fan tutte in 2020 she has been numbered among the most outstanding conductors of her generation. In the Festival’s one-hundred-year history she was the first woman to be entrusted with the task of conducting a new production and an entire run of performances. Joana Mallwitz has been general music director of the Nuremberg State Theatre since the 2018/19 season. From 2023/24 she will be artistic director and chief conductor of the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra.

In 2021/22 she was the subject of an artist’s portrait by the Vienna Musikverein, in the course of which she conducted concerts with both the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. She also made debuts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre National de France, as well as at the Semperoper in Dresden, where she conducted a new production of Rusalka.

Other companies with which she has appeared in recent years include the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (Eugene Onegin and L’elisir d’amore), the Frankfurt Opera (Salome and Die lustige Witwe), the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen (Der fliegende Holländer and Madama Butterfly), the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo (Der Rosenkavalier) and the Zurich Opera (Macbeth). Concert engagements have taken her to the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, the hr Symphony Orchestra in Frankfurt, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the Munich Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

After working as a staff conductor at the Heidelberg Theatre for a number of years, Joana Mallwitz became the youngest general music director in Europe when she joined the Erfurt Theatre in 2014/15. Here she founded the Orchestral Academy of the Philharmonic Orchestra, established a composer in residence programme under the title Erfurts Neue Noten and devised a series of Expedition Concerts. This format has proved a huge success also in her new artistic home, the Nuremberg State Theatre, and online. Her first two productions in Nuremberg, Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Wagner’s Lohengrin, brought her name to national and international attention. In 2021/22 she conducted three new productions in Nuremberg: Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Pelléas et Mélisande and Der Rosenkavalier.

Joana Mallwitz was born in Hildesheim and studied at the University of Music, Theatre and Media in Hanover, where her teachers included Martin Brauß and Eiji Oue (conducting) and Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and Bernd Goetzke (piano).

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Joana Mallwitz director
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Joana Mallwitz director
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Joana Mallwitz
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Joana Mallwitz Conductor
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