The South Korean conductor Yura Yang made her Salzburg Festival debut in 2025, and this summer conducts the world premiere of King Arthur Junior. She is the designated general music director of the Saarland State Theatre and will take up this position in the 2027/28 season.
Since the start of the 2024/25 season, she has been principal Kapellmeister at the Leipzig Opera, where this season her conducting engagements have included revivals of Verdi’s La traviata and Rigoletto, Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte, Bellini’s Norma and Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. She has recently made debuts at the Komische Oper Berlin with Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel and at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein with Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty. In the coming season she will take over the musical direction for Le nozze di Figaro and Der fliegende Holländer at the Leipzig Opera.
From 2020 to 2024 she was Kapellmeister at the Karlsruhe State Theatre, where she conducted Hänsel und Gretel, Verdi’s Nabucco and Aida, Bizet’s Carmen, Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, Strauss’s Salome, Léhar‘s Die lustige Witwe, Dvořák’s Rusalka and Puccini’s La bohème.
She also made guest appearances with Aribert Reimann’s Gespenstersonate at the Semperoper Dresden, Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin at the Brucknerhaus Linz and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the Aalto Musiktheater Essen. In addition, she has appeared at Bonn Opera, Theater Erfurt and Theater Regensburg, and conducted the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn and the Munich Radio Orchestra.
During 2018/19 she was Kapellmeister at Theater Kiel, where she conducted productions including Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, Swan Lake, Die Frau ohne Schatten and the world premiere of Marco Tutino’s Falscher Verrat (Falso tradimento). In 2019/20 she was engaged as principal Kapellmeister and deputy general music director at Theater Aachen, where she conducted productions of Werther, Sweeney Todd and The Queen of Spades.
She began her career working from 2012 to 2018 as a répétiteur with additional conducting duties at the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen.
Yura Yang studied conducting at the Detmold University of Music and at the University of Music and Theatre in Munich. In 2016 she became a member of the Forum Dirigieren (Conductors’ Forum) of the German Music Council, and in 2019 she joined Forum Dirigieren’s concert funding programme.
