Jörg Widmann takes over the artistic direction of the Lucerne Festival Academy

Sebastian Nordmann, the future Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival from 2026, has announced his first major personnel decision. Coinciding with Nordmann's official inauguration in January, the German composer, clarinetist, and conductor Jörg Widmann will assume the artistic direction of the Lucerne Festival Academy. This division encompasses many of the festival's activities and events in the field of contemporary music.

The festival sees its academy, founded in 2004 by Pierre Boulez and Michael Haefliger, as a "master school" in the field of new and contemporary music. It has its own ensemble, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, and draws on a growing network of over 1,500 instrumentalists, conductors, and composers for its events. Until his death in July 2024, composer Wolfgang Rihm served as artistic director of the academy and its Composer Seminar. Jörg Widmann, a former student of Rihm, will succeed him in both positions starting in January 2026.

Jörg Widmann, born in Munich in 1973, is one of today's most sought-after composers and is also present on numerous international stages as an instrumentalist and conductor. After studying clarinet in Munich and at the Juilliard School in New York, he studied composition with Kay Westermann, Wilfried Hiller, Hans Werner Henze, Heiner Goebbels, and Wolfgang Rihm.

His works are now premiered and regularly performed by leading orchestras such as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra. Jörg Widmann was Composer-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival in 2009. In 2012, his opera "Babylon," based on a text by Peter Sloterdijk, premiered at the Bavarian State Opera.

In recent years, he has also increasingly expanded his conducting activities. He has appeared with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, among others. He is also Principal Guest Conductor of the NDR Radio Philharmonic and Artistic Partner of the Sinfonietta Riga.

In addition to his work as a composer and conductor, he performs as a clarinetist with partners such as Daniel Barenboim, Tabea Zimmermann, András Schiff, and Hélène Grimaud. Several contemporary works have been dedicated to him, including clarinet concertos by Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann, and Mark Andre. Widmann initially taught clarinet and composition in Freiburg im Breisgau from 2001 to 2015. Since 2017, he has taught composition at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin.

Widmann commented on his appointment that it was a "significant task" to be able to continue the tradition established in Lucerne by Pierre Boulez and Wolfgang Rihm. His goal was to "embed contemporary music even more firmly in our programs and provide young composers, instrumentalists, and conductors with the best opportunities and performance conditions."

Sebastian Nordmann declared that Widmann's "passionate ability to inspire people for classical and especially contemporary music" and his "inspiring way" of building bridges between tradition and modernity in both his compositions and his programs made him the "absolute ideal candidate" to succeed Wolfgang Rihm as director of the Academy. Nordmann and Widmann will present the programs for their first festival season in January 2026.