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Katharina Duda
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In April and May 2025, the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar presented Mieczysław Weinberg's opera The Passenger in a new production staged by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito under the musical direction of Roland Kluttig. We spoke to the conductor about his special relationship with Soviet music and the significance of Weinberg's opera for the memory of Nazi atrocities.
Alban Berg, Wozzeck
Roland Kluttig, conductor
Düsseldorfer Symphoniker
As "one of the few conductors in the world who performs the newest music as adeptly as Beethoven, Wagner, and Sibelius" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Roland Kluttig can be experienced on international stages in opera and concert with a wide-ranging repertoire. A particular focus of his work are the compositions of Schumann, Wagner, Berg, Debussy, Janáček, and Sibelius.
Roland Kluttig kicked off the current season conducting the Ensemble Modern at the Tongyeong International Music Festival. He will continue his work as Principal Guest Conductor at the Wermland Opera in Sweden with three concert programmes, and he will also make his debut with the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra. Another debut is scheduled for May 2026: following his great success with Alban Berg's Wozzeck at the Aalto Theater in Essen in 2024, he will make his first guest appearance at the Staatstheater Nürnberg with a new production of Lulu directed by Jens-Daniel Herzog.
Following highly acclaimed productions of Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Szymanowski's Król Roger at Graz Opera, he served as principal conductor there from 2020 to 2023. The Austrian premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas' opera Morgen und Abend and Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman and Janáček's Katja Kabanova stand out from this period, as do concerts with the Graz Philharmonic at the Musikverein Graz and the Konzerthaus Wien. In 2021, his conducting of Morton Feldman's Neither at the Salzburg Festival with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was hailed in the press as a ‘stellar moment’. He also conducted the first staged production of Die Walküre at the Greek National Opera to great acclaim. Last season, he conducted a new production of Mieczysław Weinberg's opera The Passenger at the German National Theatre in Weimar, staged by the directing duo Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito.
During his time as General Music Director at the Landestheater Coburg (2010 - 2020), productions of Wagner's Lohengrin and Parsifal attracted national interest. He was nominated as Conductor of the Year by Opernwelt magazine for his conducting of Beethoven's Fidelio. Since 2000, he has enjoyed a close collaboration with the Stuttgart State Opera. Among other things, he brought out the spectacular new production of Strauss' Salome there in 2015 and a new production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in 2019.
Roland Kluttig has also been invited as a guest conductor at the Frankfurt Opera (Euryanthe) the Hamburg State Opera (Die tote Stadt) the Leipzig Opera, the Mannheim National Theater, the Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur, the Opéra national du Rhin, the Swedish Norrlandsoperan (Wozzeck and Peter Grimes); in concert he has worked with the Philharmonia Orchestra London, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Prague Philharmonia, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and many others.
His recordings of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron with the Stuttgart State Opera and Weinberg's The Passenger with the Graz Opera received very positive reviews in the international press. He has also recorded works by less prominent composers whose music is close to his heart, including Erwin Schulhoff with the DSO Berlin and Silvestre Revueltas with the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, of which he was Musical Director in the 1990s. Roland Kluttig studied in Dresden and has been sponsored by the Eötvös Institute, the Conductors' Forum of the German Music Council, the Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Herbert von Karajan Foundation. Since 2025, he has been a professor and director of the university orchestra at the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music in Dresden.
Season 2025/26
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.
Varèse and Zappa – Story of a Phone Call
Sieben letzte worte
Bernd Alois Zimmermann – Staged Concert
Music in the Shadow of Wars
Alphorn
Orient Express
Clara and Robert
Individual Works
"Roland Kluttig offers not merely an orchestral reading but an almost visual realisation of the score, one of the rare works that allows a conductor to construct such serially organised momentum that one has the distinct impression of listening to a film. This polyphonic writing, whose colouring recalls Mahler, is rendered with all the clarity its naturally formidable density permits. Tempi are broadened in order to support the singers more effectively; transitions remain taut, while tension and violence are dispensed with consummate skill before erupting at crucial moments. Refined strings that never saturate the texture, incisive woodwinds and threatening brass combine to create an experience that at times evokes the very finest achievements of Weimar cinema."
Opera Diary, 31 May 2026 (Lulu at Staatstheater Nürnberg)
"Roland Kluttig achieves a musical quality with the Staatskapelle Weimar that takes your breath away. From the laconic parland tone to the undisguised pathos: to help the richness and originality of a piece of music to its rightful place in this way has something of equalising justice and puts Weinberg in the right light."
concerti, 6 April 2025, Joachim Lange (about the premiere of The Passenger)
"Guest conductor Roland Kluttig succeeds in discreetly promoting the good flow of the orchestra. He ensures clarity of structure with clear tempi and occasional accentuation of individual voices or groups and otherwise never succumbs to the obvious temptation to act like a sound magician. The fact that the magic arises from a certain sobriety only makes it all the greater.....What has happened here is greater than the work of a single musician can be."
Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, November 2023
"What makes the outwardly austere, inwardly rich performance a stroke of luck is the high musical quality provided by Roland Kluttig on the podium. Kluttig not only restores the dramaturgically harsher original version of the final act and adopts the much livelier tempi from Tchaikovsky's score - autograph, he breathes the music throughout with a harsher, more natural, less operatic tone, as befits the ‘lyrical scenes’."
Opernwelt, November 2023, Uwe Schweikert
"A great farewell from Graz....Together with Philippe Jordan and above all Dirk Kaftan, Roland Kluttig can be considered one of the defining figures of opera in Graz over the last quarter of a century. With its natural flow, balanced sound and fine musicality, the Schumann performance once again demonstrated the status of Kluttig and the ensembles."
Kleine Zeitung, 17 June 2023, Martin Gasser
"What need is there for images when Roland Kluttig conducts the overture to ‘The Flying Dutchman’? A whole ocean rages in the imagination anyway, Kluttig lets it roll in ever new waves, full of rage and force. Initially, the ‘redemption motif’ is the only thing that stands against it, savoured infinitely slowly, only to finally prevail - the final version is played - as if everything necessary had already been said by the orchestra with this overture. How precisely the chief conductor of Graz Opera knows how to think about music is not only evident from the programme booklet. There, he reflects on the loud dynamisation of the winds in Wagner's breakthrough work, which, according to the conductor, would nevertheless carry the risk of a loss of power if retouched. On the podium, he succeeds in both: the Graz Philharmonic does not interfere with the singing, or only to a manageable extent, and the conducting has more than enough energy."
Opernwelt, June 2022, Michael Stallknecht
"Kluttig and his Graz Philharmonic maintained a similarly analytical approach in the second part of the concert. In Strauss' Alpine Symphony, they were fortunately miles away from giving this programme music a thick coat of Louis Trenker conquering alpinism. Instead of a thick trowel, subtle differentiation prevailed, which was more reminiscent of Mahler and Nietzsche than heroic glorification."
Kronenzeitung, 27 September 2021, Reinhard Schwarz
"Roland Kluttig, one of the few conductors in the world who can conduct the latest music just as skilfully as Beethoven, Wagner and Sibelius."
FAZ, 17 August 2021, Jan Brachmann
"A great moment with Graz participation.....Feldman has rarely been heard in such a dramatic, exciting and vibrant way. It is nothing less than a demystification that the head of the Graz Philharmonic has achieved. He turns ‘Neither’ into what it claims to be in the subtitle: an opera."
Kleine Zeitung, 14 August 2021, Martin Gasser
"Roland Kluttig, currently General Music Director in Coburg, lets Dukas' music blossom in bright colours, but also pays close attention to the many shades of grey with which the score already points ahead to modernity. The conductor, who is very familiar with contemporary music, always follows the soft curves of this thoroughly French music, allows it to breathe organically and occasionally tightens the reins when the dramatic climax needs to be reached."
FAZ, 08 March 2018, Reinhard Kager
"But the centre of power and gravity of this acclaimed production is Roland Kluttig. Together with the Philharmonic Orchestra, the General Music Director has created a knowingly phrased, glowing, always flowing Wagner full of dynamic fine gradations and tonal colour discoveries."
concerti, April 2017, Peter Krause
70 Jahre Grazer Philharmoniker
Bruckner Sinfonie Nr. 6 A Dur 2. Satz, Grazer Philharmoniker
Bruckner Sinfonie Nr. 6 A Dur 3. Satz, Grazer Philharmoniker
Bruckner Sinfonie Nr. 6 A Dur 4. Satz, Grazer Philharmoniker
Konzerthausorchester