Jörg Widmann is one of the most impressive and versatile artists of his generation and appears worldwide as a clarinettist, conductor and composer. He is principal guest conductor of the NDR Radiophilharmonie, creative partner of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, artistic partner of Sinfonietta Riga and associate conductor of the Munich Chamber Orchestra. From 2026 he will assume the artistic direction of the Lucerne Festival Academy.
In the 2024/25 season he has conducted orchestras including the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra Taiwan and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and returned to the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Irish Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa. He performed his Danse macabre in Madrid and both Danse macabre and his Towards Paradise with Håken Hardenberger and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Japan. He was also artist in residence with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and artistic curator of the Grafenegg Academy. In 2023/24 he expanded his activity as a conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
He has also continued his longstanding chamber music partnerships with artists including Nicolas Altstaedt, Sarah Aristidou, András Schiff, Antoine Tamestit, Dénes Várjon, Carolin Widmann and the Hagen Quartet, giving performances at the Vienna Musikverein, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin and the Alte Oper in Frankfurt.
Following his clarinet studies in Munich and at the Juilliard School, he studied composition with Kay Westermann, Wilfried Hiller, Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm. Conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Daniel Harding, Kent Nagano, Christian Thielemann, Andris Nelsons and Simon Rattle regularly perform his music, while orchestras such as the Vienna, Berlin and New York Philharmonics as well as the Orchestre de Paris, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra have incorporated his music in their regular repertory.
Jörg Widmann has held the composition chair at the Barenboim-Said Akademie since 2017. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Music Prize of the City of Munich in 2021 and the Hamburg Bach Prize in 2023. He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg and the Mainz Academy of Science and Literature. In 2023 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Limerick in Ireland. In 2024 he became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
