Joanna Mallwitz is a German conductor and pianist.
She began to study violin at age 3, and piano at age 5.
At age 14, she became a pupil of Christa-Maria Hartmann and Karl-Heinz Kämmerling.
She continued her music studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, where her teachers included Martin Brauss and Eiji Ōue, in conducting, and she continued piano studied with Kämmerling and with Bernd Goetzke.
In 2004, she received a conducting stipend from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.
Conductor Joana Mallwitz makes her Met debut leading an extraordinary cast in Mozart’s comic masterpiece. Bass-baritone Michael Sumuel stars as the clever valet Figaro, opposite soprano Olga Kulchynska as his betrothed, the wily maid Susanna. Baritone Joshua Hopkins is the skirt-chasing Count, with soprano Federica Lombardi as his anguished wife and mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa as the adolescent page Cherubino. This live cinema transmission is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to movie theaters across the globe.
As a shooting star among the conductors, she was the youngest general music director in Europe, was elected "Conductor of the Year" and celebrated her acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2020. The documentation accompanies Joana Mallwitz on her further career path until she took office in Berlin and at the same time gives a very personal insight into the life of the conductor.
Follows Joana Mallwitz during two pivotal years – when she gives birth to her son and her career accelerates significantly. But whether she’s at home, at rehearsals, or in the spotlight, the German conductor strives to prove that perfection at work is just as important as finding the right rhythm in life.
Conductors Andris Nelsons, Klaus Mäkelä, Riccardo Chailly and Petr Popelka conduct the four movements of Beethoven's 'Symphony No. 9' in succession across Europe. An epic concert celebrating the bicentenary of the creation of Beethoven's masterpiece.
As Christof Loy put it: Così fan tutte invites us to embrace the complexity of life and face the future with heads held high. In his staging of the version he abridged with Joana Mallwitz for the Salzburg Festival 2020 the focus is wholly on the figures and the subtle choreography of their emotional states — in a space that like a magnifying glass exposes the intricate mechanisms between the characters. In this way the production leads the protagonists and the audience to experience the ‘serene calm’ that can perhaps indeed cure our own ‘distempers’.
When a woman steps onto the conductor's podium, she is always one of the first: the first to lead a world-class orchestra, the first to conduct the closing night of London's Proms, the first to win the German Conductor Prize. It seems as though the world of orchestral conducting might finally be ready to change its attitudes toward female conductors.