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Sebastian Weigle

Conductor Sebastian Weigle specializes in Romantic opera, especially Wagner, and has conducted at some of the world's leading opera houses. He also conducts symphonic music and, as of the mid-2020s, was serving as chief conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. Weigle was born in 1961 in East Berlin, East Germany. His father, Gottfried Weigle, was the cantor at the Schlosskirche in the city's Berlin-Buch district, and he is the nephew of the conductor Jörg-Peter Weigle. His first instrument was the French horn, and he was a founding member of the Berlin Wind Quintet in 1975. Weigle attended Berlin's Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, studying horn, piano, and conducting. He later held a lectureship there. In 1982, he became principal hornist of the Berlin Staatskapelle, remaining in that position until 1997. Weigle also played the horn in the East Berlin jazz orchestra Vielharmonie and was a member of the Berliner Oktett. The Staatskapelle position was a prestigious one, but Weigle remained interested in conducting. He founded the Kammerchor Berlin in 1987, handpicking its members, and in 1990, he became conductor of the Neues Berliner Kammerorchester. From 1993 to 2018, he was music director of the Junge Philharmonie Brandenburg. The year 1993 also saw Weigle make his recording debut as hornist of the Berliner Bläserquintett on the album Jean Françaix in Concert. His conducting debut on recordings came in 1998 on the MDG label, leading the Ensemble Villa Musica on an album of works by Louis Spohr. Weigle's career as an opera conductor specializing in German opera grew rapidly in the late '90s and the first years of the new century. He became First Staatskapellmeister at the Staatsoper Berlin in 1997, and from 2004 to 2009, he was general music director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain. Weigle made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in 2007, leading a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that was directed by Richard Wagner's great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner. The following year, he became general music director of the Frankfurt Opera. Weigle has been in high demand with prestigious companies as a guest conductor, including the Staatsoper Hamburg (in Strauss' Salome) in 2014), the Metropolitan Opera in New York (in Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier) in 2017, and Covent Garden in London (in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel) in 2019. That year, he was named principal conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony in Tokyo, where he remained as of the mid-2020s; he stepped down as director of the Frankfurt Opera in 2023. Weigle has a substantial recording catalog of well over 40 albums, many of them made with the Frankfurt Opera forces, devoted to German opera and appearing on the Oehms Classics label. In 2023, he moved to Naxos, leading the Frankfurter Opern- and Museumsorchester, Frankfurt Opera Chorus, and soloists in Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Christmas Eve.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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