The conductor Joana Mallwitz mixes the intensity with accessibility

The director Joana Mallwitz apologized for having arrived late for her interview with the Metropolitan Opera House last week, but she needed to resume her breath after the tests. “Conduct is a sweaty deal,” he said, while setting himself into a direct posture on a sofa in the press room, his surprising hands with long fingers elegantly crossed on the wrists.

Monday Mallwitz, 39 years old – the musical director of the Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest growing classic stars in his native Germany – his debut with Mozart “The Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart. He had a close relationship with that work since his first job, at 19, at the Heidelberg Theater, a small house in which his duties included “everything that is done like Kapellmeister”, he said: providing for singers, playing the continuous part on the harpsichord and, when necessary, jumping shortly notice to conduct a performance.

“Develop a relationship with such a job,” said “Figaro”. “You know you.”

At the end of the tests of that afternoon he had worked with the orchestra with the details of the minutes in the overwhelming, with finely dynamic contrasts and highlighting the shock value – “like rock music”, he told the musicians – of the strong explosions that interrupt the rapid gurgling notes. The key, he said later, was “to bring some energy into the sound that does not become difficult when the game becomes stronger”.

Working with the Met musicians, he said, was a joy because after having developed a small section, “I am able to hear what my style is and transferring it” in the rest of the piece. “I am able to collect it because they are also mentally virtuous,” he said. “It is incredible what this orchestra is able to provide in terms of time and transparency and diversity of the effects. You want to draw on all this, but also to obtain a combination of lightness and drama.”

Lightness and drama, accessibility and intransigent seriousness in its score approach: these are at the center of Mallwitz’s surprising rise to the relief in a profession dominated by men. In 2014, at 28 he became the musical director of the Erfurt Theater, the younger conductor To maintain such a position in Europe. In 2018, he hired the leadership of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution that he had also worked as a trampoline for the director Cristiano Thielemann when he was 23 years old. In his second season the best director of the year was voted by a jury of German critics. A famous race of “so fans all” by Mozart in Salzburg in 2020 catapulted it to international attention.

With the Konzerthaus Orchestra, he produced a stormy recording last season of rarely listening to Kurt Weill for Deutsche Grammophon. His debut in Met follows his debut with Berlin Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic for a few weeks, where he combined the works of Tchaikovsky and Schubert with a piece inspired by technology From the Serbian composer Marko Nikodijevic.

Mallwitz’s earliness is all the more remarkable because it did not come from a musical family. Her talent on the piano at home in Hildesheim was quickly evident, but for three hours every afternoon she was forbidden to touch it and instead send to play in the garden. However, it rapidly climbed through the national network of youth musical competitions both on the plane and on the violin and entered the Hanover Conservatory at the age of 13, in the institute just coined for the first progress of the musically very gifted musically. His cohort of four included the pianist Igor Levit.

“Until then, I had practically lived behind the moon,” he said. He knew the chamber pieces he had studied but had not almost participated in concerts. At the Institute, he remembered: “They just put the scores in front of us by Schubert, Schumann, Stravinsky, Wagner’s” Tristan “, saying:” What you hear in your head when you read these notes. “I thought:” How did I not know that there was such fabulous music? “”

It was seized by the desire to dedicate his life to this music, and since the works so overwhelmed were largely orchestral, this meant becoming a director.

Director Martin Brauss, who directs the Hanover institute, recalls that he has witnessed these epiphanies in the classroom. “When you are dealing with talent as a professional, it is sometimes almost frightening to see what nature can produce,” he said in a telephone interview. “Joana was one of these cases. Anchina in the notes and, purely through vision, an inner hearing takes place.”

Since she was assumed so young from her first theater in Heidelberg, Mallwitz has mainly developed her conduction technique, which combines graceful precision with radical gestures that transmit gusts of excitement, in the workplace. “Look at what music does and put it in motion,” said Brauss. “Literally embodies it.”

Jens-Daniel Herzog, the intent of the Nuremberg State Theater, said that the public responded both to the intensity of its direction and to the accommodating relationship he built in his work addressed to the public. “He has a way of infecting people with his enthusiasm that is completely dissolved,” he said. “He stormed everyone. He was breathtaking.”

In Berlin, Mallwitz was almost immediately forced to add a political defense to his numerous roles. The dramatic and sudden cuts in the city’s cultural budget announced last year caused painful cancellations. “Sometimes you tear you apart,” he said of the lobbying work that he had to juggle with his duties of direction and administrative. Raising a child with her husband, the tenor Simon Bode, he often sits at night studying his scores.

But he said that fighting for the financing of public arts was essential, not to support an elite tradition, but to maintain ticket prices at a level that almost everyone can afford it. “The word” subsidies “is completely out of place in this context,” he said. “We are not a poorly managed society in crisis. If Germany is proud of its culture, keeping concerts at affordable prices should be a basic civil right.”

The budget cuts threaten the awareness programs that are so important for her and that have been an integral part of her success. In Berlin, his Preconcert lessons now usually attract over 1,000 listeners. To conquer new types of public, it offers new formats such as The Night Sessions, which bring celebrities from other art forms and explore topics such as Rhythm in conversation with a techno artist or timing with a theatrical actor. “In these sessions I want to learn something,” he said. “I’m curious to know.”

After the night session dedicated to the rhythm, he said: “The best thing was to discover later that a group of young people who were incessantly on Google something about their phones had sought Steve Reich’s works because now they wanted to hear more. This is when I said to myself:” See? Brilliant. It was exactly what I was later. “