Monday 6 July 2020

Youth has it: 24-year-old Patrick Hahn appointed as General Music Director in Wuppertal

Patrick Hahn (Photo Gerhard Donauer)
Patrick Hahn
(Photo Gerhard Donauer)
The Austrian conductor Patrick Hahn has been appointed as the new General Music Director of Wuppertaler Bühnen und Sinfonieorchester (Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra), making him at 24 the youngest General Music Director in Germany. Hahn will succeed Julia Jones from the beginning of the 2021/22 season.

Hahn studied piano and conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, as well as being invited to the Aspen Music Festival and the Tanglewood Music Center as Conducting Fellow. As well as working in classical music, Hahn is involved in both cabaret Austrian satirist and composer Georg Kreisler, and jazz. As a composer, his opera Die Frittatensuppe was premiered in 2008, and in 2013 he was awarded second prize for Ameraustrica in the 2013 Penfield Music Commission Project Contest in New York.

Around 100 conductors from Germany and abroad applied for the position with the roughly 90-member orchestra, and Hahn was selected after a three-stage process with the unanimous decision of the 11-member selection committee.

Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, East of Düsseldorf, is the home not only of the orchestra but of the Pina Bausch Dance Company. The orchestra was founded in 1882, and distinguished conductors such as Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer began their careers in Wuppertal. The orchestra's home is the historic town hall (Stadthalle) in Wuppertal, one of Europe's finest concert halls (the hall opened in 1900 with a festival, one of whose conductors was the young Richard Strauss).

Further details from the orchestra's website.

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