räsonanz – Lucerne 2026
Joana Mallwitz
Since her acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival 2020 with Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Joana Mallwitz has been one of the outstanding conductors of her generation. She was appointed General Music Director at the Staatstheater Nuremberg in 2018 and was named “Conductor of the Year” in 2019.
In recent years, she has appeared at De Nationale Opera Amsterdam, the Semperoper Dresden, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Bavarian State Opera, Frankfurt Opera, Royal Danish Opera, Norwegian National Opera Oslo and Zurich Opera House.
Concert engagements have taken her to the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, HR and SWR Symphony Orchestras, Dresden Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra London, Munich Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and as a portrait artist to the Vienna Musikverein.
After her longstanding engagement as Kapellmeister at the Theater Heidelberg, Mallwitz took up her first conducting post at the Theater Erfurt in the 2014/2015 season as Europe’s youngest General Music Director. There she established the Orchestra Academy of the Erfurt Philharmonic Orchestra and founded the composer-in-residence programme known as Erfurt’s New Notes. Her Expedition Concerts, conceived during this time, also became a resounding success at the Staatstheater Nuremberg and as an online format.
Born in Hildesheim, Joana Mallwitz studied conducting with Martin Brauß and Eiji Oue and piano with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and Bernd Goetzke at the Hanover University of Music and Drama.
Joana Mallwitz has been awarded the Bavarian Constitutional Order and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She lives in Berlin with her husband and son.
In her debut season 2023/24, Joana Mallwitz recorded works by Kurt Weill with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. They will be released by Deutsche Grammophon, where the chief conductor is an exclusive artist. In early summer 2024, Momentum, a documentary film by Günter Atteln about her way to the Konzerthaus Berlin, was released in cinemas.