Contact
Maike Charlotte Fuchs
mf@karstenwitt.com+49 30 214 594-242
General Management
The works of the Prague-born composer Hans Winterberg (1901–1991), recorded by Roland Kluttig with the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz and the soloist Jonathan Powell, are a real discovery.
Until 24 November, Roland Kluttig will be conducting Pascal Dusapin’s Il Viaggio, Dante as the opera's German premiere at the Hanover State Opera, staged by Claus Guth.
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.
Pascal Dusapin, Il viaggio, Dante
Roland Kluttig, conductor
Claus Guth, stage direction
Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester Hannover
Anna Clyne, Klang und Zorn
Albert Schnelzer, Frozen Light
Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 101 in D major Hob.I: 101 'The clock'
Wermland Opera Karlstad
Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9 in D major
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.
Following two highly acclaimed productions of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (Deutsche Oper am Rhein) and Lulu (Staatstheater Nürnberg) last season, Roland Kluttig begins the 2026/27 season with Pascal Dusapin’s Il Viaggio, Dante. The production, directed by Claus Guth for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, will have its German premiere at the Staatstheater Hannover in October and can be seen at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg in May 2027. He will return to conduct concerts with the Bochumer Symphoniker, the Norddeutschen Philharmonie, the Jena Philharmonic and the Brno Philharmonic, and will continue his successful work as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Advisor to the Wermland Opera in Sweden with concerts and a further opera production (Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine).
Roland Kluttig has maintained a long-standing artistic relationship with the Graz Opera. Following acclaimed productions of Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Szymanowski’s Król Roger, he was appointed Principal Conductor in 2020, a position he held until 2023. Highlights of his tenure included the Austrian premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’ opera Morgen und Abend, as well as performances of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, alongside concerts with the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra at the Musikverein in Graz and the Konzerthaus in Vienna. In 2021, his performance of Morton Feldman’s Neither at the Salzburg Festival with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was hailed by the press as a “Sternstunde” (“stellar performance”). In 2024, he made a highly successful debut with the first staged production of Die Walküre at the Greek National Opera, followed later that year by a critically acclaimed new production of Berg’s Wozzeck at Aalto Theatre in Essen. In 2025, he conducted a new production of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Passenger at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, directed by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito.
During his tenure as General Music Director of the Landestheater Coburg from 2010 to 2020, Roland Kluttig attracted national attention with productions of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Parsifal. His conducting of Beethoven’s Fidelio earned him a nomination for Conductor of the Year by the German magazine Opernwelt. He has maintained a close artistic relationship with the Staatsoper Stuttgart since 2000, where he has made his mark with new productions including Strauss’ Salome and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. As a guest conductor, Roland Kluttig has appeared at Oper Frankfurt (Euryanthe), Staatsoper Hamburg (Die tote Stadt), Oper Leipzig, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur, Opéra national du Rhin and Sweden’s Norrlandsoperan (Wozzeck and Peter Grimes). In the concert hall, he has worked with ensembles including 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, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Staatsorchester Stuttgart and hr-Sinfonieorchester, among many others.
His recordings of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron with Staatsoper Stuttgart and Weinberg’s The Passenger with Oper Graz have received international critical acclaim. He has also championed and recorded works by composers whose music is particularly close to his heart, including Erwin Schulhoff with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Silvestre Revueltas with the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, of which he was Music Director in the 1990s. Since 2025, Roland Kluttig has been professor and director of the University Orchestra at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden.
2026/27 season
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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
"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
"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)
"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
"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)
"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