Jörg Widmann conducts Mozart & Widmann

Jörg Widmann is considered one of the most versatile and intriguing artists of his generation.

From 2026, he will be the new Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy, which has been a cornerstone of contemporary music within the festival since its founding by Pierre Boulez in 2004. During the 2025/26 season, he will be performing worldwide in all his roles as a clarinettist, conductor and composer, including his third season as Principal Guest Conductor of the NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. He is also Associate Conductor of the Munich Chamber Orchestra and Artistic Partner of Sinfonietta Riga.

Following notable appearances with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España, a key focus of the 2025/26 season will take him to the USA: for the first time, he will conduct the Cleveland Orchestra in performances of his own music and that of Mendelssohn. He will also take the podium with the Atlanta and Detroit symphony orchestras. Further guest conducting engagements will take him to the Oslo Philharmonic, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. In his capacity as Associate Conductor, he will be touring South America with the Munich Chamber Orchestra.

A highlight in February 2026 will be Olga Neuwirth’s clarinet concerto *Zones of Blue*, dedicated to Jörg Widmann, which he will premiere with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle. Another highlight will be the world premiere of Jörg Widmann’s new composition *Jupiter-Etüde* as part of the Mozart Festival in Würzburg in June 2026.

Long-standing chamber music partners such as Isabelle Faust, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Carolin Widmann, the Hagen Quartet, the Signum Quartet and the Amabile Quartet will perform alongside Jörg Widmann at venues including the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Philharmonie in Essen, the Muziekgebouw, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Auditorio Nacional de Música, Toppan Hall and the Boulez Saal.

At the 2015 Donaueschingen Music Festival, Widmann premiered Mark Andre’s Clarinet Concerto. Other clarinet concertos dedicated to him or written for him include Wolfgang Rihm’s Music for Clarinet and Orchestra (1999) and Aribert Reimann’s Cantus (2006).

Conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Daniel Harding, Kent Nagano, Franz Welser-Möst, Christian Thielemann, Iván Fischer, Andris Nelsons and Sir Simon Rattle regularly perform his music. Orchestras such as the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the London Symphony Orchestra and many others have premiered his music and regularly include it in their concert repertoire. In the 2023/24 season, Jörg Widmann was Composer in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. The residency culminated in the world premiere of his Horn Concerto, featuring Stefan Dohr as soloist and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Studied under Gerd Starke in Munich and Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York, Jörg Widmann was himself a professor of clarinet and composition at the Freiburg University of Music. Since 2017, Widmann has held a chair in composition at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin. In recognition of his services to music, he was appointed a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in June 2024. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg (2007) and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz (2016); in February 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Limerick, Ireland. In July 2025, Jörg Widmann was elected President of the International Max Reger Society.

Jörg Widmann studied composition with Kay Westermann, Wilfried Hiller, Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm. His work has received numerous awards, most recently the prestigious Bach Prize from the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, as well as the Music Prize of the City of Munich.

The world of glass sounds opened up to Christa Schönfeldinger in the early nineties. After studying violin in Vienna, she first embarked on an orchestral career. Then it was a music puzzle in a daily newspaper, of all things, that drew her and her husband Gerald’s attention to a very special instrument: the glass harmonica. It would determine the course of her artistic life and eventually lead to the founding of the Vienna Glass Harmonica Duo.

Today, Christa Schönfeldinger is one of the world’s leading glass harmonica virtuosos. She has not only been able to take the traditional historical playing techniques to a new level, but has also expanded the playing of the glass harmonica with new techniques and contemporary musical aesthetics to achieve unimagined tonal effects. Her repertoire ranges from the standard works for glass harmonica (Mozart, Reichardt, Röllig, Schulz) to orchestral and operatic literature (Hasse, Donizetti, R. Strauss, Saint-Saëns) and numerous arrangements from the classical to the avant-garde.

Her interpretations have inspired contemporary composers to create new works, such as Jörg Widmann’s “Armonica” with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Pierre Boulez, which was premiered at the International Mozart Week Salzburg. Numerous invitations as soloist and chamber musician led her to the opening of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Musikverein Vienna, Salzburg Festival, Int. Mozartwoche Salzburg, PROMS Festival Royal Albert Hall, Schleswig Holstein Festival, Carinthischer Sommer, Int. Haydn Tage Eisenstadt, Philharmonie Berlin, Dresdner Musikfestspiele, Bayreuth, Warsaw Autumn, Warsaw Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonic, Kennedy Center Suntory Hall Tokyo and others.

Collaborations with the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, New Philharmonic Orchestra Tokyo, National Symphony Orchestra Washington, Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Dresdner Philharmonie, NDR and hr- Symphonie Orchester, Bruckner Orchester Linz, under Daniel Barenboim, Kirill Petrenko, Pierre Boulez, Kent Nagano, Christoph Eschenbach, Franz Welser-Möst, Christoph Thielemann, Fabio Luisi, Sylvain Camberling, John Axelrod, Paavo Järvi and others.

Born in Apulia in southern Italy, Teodoro Anzellotti grew up near Baden-Baden. He pursued his accordion studies at the Hochschulen in Karlsruhe and Trossingen and quickly achieved victories at various international competitions.

Since the 1980s he has been a regular guest at the major festivals and with leading orchestras. Teodoro Anzellotti has successfully contributed to integrating the accordion into the sphere of classical music.

This has occurred principally through his service to New Music: through his development of performing techniques he has enlarged the tone-color capabilities and sonic profile of his instrument.

More than 300 new works have been written for Teodoro Anzellotti, by composers such as George Aperghis, Brice Pauset, Heinz Holliger, Toshio Hosokawa, Mauricio Kagel, Michael Jarrell, Isabel Mundry, Gerard Pesson, Matthias Pintscher, Wolfgang Rihm, Salvatore Sciarrino, Marco Stroppa, Jörg Widmann und Hans Zender.

Luciano Berio created for him his Sequenza XIII, which Mr. Anzellotti premiered in Rotterdam in 1995 and subsequently performed at major festivals worldwide. Since 1987 he has taught at the Hochschule der Künste Bern, and since 2002 at the Musikhochschule Freiburg im Breisgau as well.

His discography embraces a spectrum reaching from Bach and Scarlatti to Janácek and Satie to John Cage and Matthias Pintscher.