Witolf Werner

Witolf Werner was born in 1978 in Mönchengladbach and began his education first with piano lessons. With some maturity he later took cello and singing lessons. The C-exam for church musicians followed. In 1997 he was awarded the TrudeFischer Prize for Young Artists. From 1999 he studied orchestra conducting with Prof. Michael Luig, MHS Cologne, attended master classes in Trier and Budapest and assisted Michael Gielen with the SWR Baden-Baden Freiburg Symphony Orchestra.

After his first engagements in Osnabrück and Dortmund, Witolf Werner continued his successful work at the Theater Bielefeld in the 2005/06 season, where he has been active since then as a répétiteur and, since 2008, also as study director, assistant to GMD Peter Kuhn and 2nd Kapellmeister, in the last year of his engagement also as provisional 1st Kapellmeister. He was accepted into the “Richard-Wagner-Stiftung” and was awarded a scholarship by the Deutsche-Bank-Stiftung (Akademie Musiktheater heute). The work of his circle of scholarship holders, the opera “Helges Leben”, was premiered on the Bielefeld stage in 2009.

As guest conductor of the Bergische Symphoniker he performed the opera “The Cunning Little Vixen” in 2004 and conducted subsequent concert series. At the beginning of 2009 he was musical director of the premiere of Luca Martin’s opera “Jo-Ion” in Basel. In the 2010/11 season, among other works, he presented the German second performance of Unsuk Chin’s opera “Alice in Wonderland” at the Theater Bielefeld, for which he was voted “Conductor of the Year” in the critics’ survey of the “Welt am Sonntag”. In the 2011/12 season he gave guest performances at the Solingen/Remscheid Theatres, the Musiktheater im Revier and the Staatstheater Darmstadt. In 2013/14 he worked as a freelancer, among others as a lecturer at the Orchestra Academy NRW.

In the summer of 2014, he conducted the nationwide advertised university production “Così fan tutte” in Montepulciano with the Orchestra of the Orchesterzentrum NRW.

In addition to his theatre engagements, Witolf Werner always had time for youth and amateur ensembles: in Bielefeld, he conducted the Freie SinfonieOrchester from 2007 to 2014, and in 2009 to 2016 he conducted the KinderOrchester NRW with successful concerts throughout Germany. Moreover, he has toured with numerous youth orchestras. He has also made a name for himself as a pianist and accompanist, as numerous concerts both in Germany and abroad prove.

Since the 2014/15 season, Witolf Werner has been mainly active in Austria: He is the new head of the Stage Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, responsible for all the stage music and – of particular concern to him – the music mediation for the next generations; he conducts children’s opera and moderates children’s and youth concerts. In spring 2017, he took over the direction of the Academic Symphony Orchestra Vienna as a further task.