Jonathan Nott

Jonathan Nott, who was born in 1962 in Solihull near Birmingham, studied music at Cambridge University, flute and voice at the Royal Northern College in Manchester, and orchestral conducting in London. He launched his conducting career in 1989 at Frankfurt Opera before taking up the post of First Kapellmeister in 1991 at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, where he was interim Chief Conductor for the 1995-96 season. In 1997 Nott began his tenure as General Music Director of the Luzerner Theater and Music Director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, which lasted until 2002. For 16 years, from 2000 to 2016, he served as Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, which he led in 656 concerts and took on tour to performances at the Salzburg Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, and the BBC Proms in London, as well as to Russia, Japan, China, South America, and the United States. Nott has been Music Director of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and First Conductor of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie since 2014; he has additionally helmed the storied Orchestre de la Suisse Romande since 2017. Nott has conducted the Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles Philharmonics; the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; the Staatskapelle Dresden; and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He is intensively committed to contemporary music and has recorded the complete orchestral works of György Ligeti with the Berlin Philharmonic at the request of the composer himself. He is the chairman of the selection committee for the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition, which was founded in 2004. Jonathan Nott, who was “artiste étoile” at LUCERNE FESTIVAL in 2007 and conducted Wagner’s Ring cycle here in 2013, holds the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Golden Ring of Honor of the City of Bamberg (both 2011).

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 24 August 1996 with the Requiem by Hans Werner Henze and the monodrama Kassandra by Michael Jarrell.

July 2018