Titus Engel
In 2020 Titus Engel was named Conductor of the Year by Opernwelt magazine. Respected for his expertise in the field of historical performance practice as well as for his precise conducting of complex contemporary projects, the Berlin-born Zurich native can also be regularly seen performing canonic works in the opera repertory – he thrilled audiences with Lohengrin at the Tiroler Festspiele Erl in 2021.
Starting in the 2023/24 season, Titus Engel will take over as principal conductor of the Basel Sinfonietta. After concerts with the Camerata Salzburg at the Salzburg Festival and at the Tiroler Festspiele Erl, where he conducts all of Brahms’s symphonies, he starts the 2022/23 season with Christoph Marthaler’s new production of Weber’s Der Freischütz in Basel. He will then return to the Bavarian State Opera for Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel and Lehár’s Giuditta as well as to Lyon for Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and to Stuttgart for Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. He can be heard in concerts with the Big-Band of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra and the SWR Symphony Orchestra.
Guest conducting engagements have included performances with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Philharmonia Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, WDR Symphony Orchestra, Hanover State Orchestra, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the chamber orchestras in Zurich and Munich, as well as with Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien.
He made his opera debut with the premiere of Benjamin Schweitzer’s Jakob von Gunten in Dresden in 2000. Since then, he has also conducted Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (Theater an der Wien), Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Berg’s Wozzeck (Stuttgart Opera), Offenbach’s Fantasio (Komische Oper Berlin), Mozart’s Betulia liberata, Strauss’s Salome and Nielsen’s Maskerade (Frankfurt Opera), Georg Friedrich Haas’s Bluthaus (Bavarian State Opera), Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Opera Vlaanderen), Nunes’s La Douce (Berlin State Opera), Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges (Opéra de Lyon), Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (Grand Théâtre de Genève) and Verdi´s La traviata (Theater Basel).
Titus Engel’s debut at the Teatro Real Madrid conducting the world premiere of Juan Jurado’s La página en blanco in 2011 was widely praised by the press and audiences alike. He followed this with triumphant world premieres of Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain (2014) and Elena Mendoza’s La ciudad de las mentiras (2017). In 2016 together with Lydia Steier he brought the Swiss premiere of Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht to the stage at Theater Basel – Opernwelt magazine named the production ‘Performance of the Year’. In 2017 he conducted the premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s opera Infinite Now at the Opera Vlaanderen, the National Theatre in Mannheim and the Philharmonie de Paris.
After studying musicology and philosophy in Zurich and Berlin Titus Engel studied conducting in Dresden with Christian Kluttig. This training was supplemented by support from the Conductors Forum of the German Music Council and David Zinman’s American Academy of Conducting at Aspen, as well as assistantships with Sylvain Cambreling, Marc Albrecht and Peter Rundel. Titus Engel has recorded numerous works for radio and CD and is the founder of the Akademie Musiktheater Heute, in addition to having edited several books on contemporary opera.