On a Monday morning in Berlin, Joana Mallwitz is flying the flag for Kurt Weill – and not just the familiar, theatrical Kurt Weill of the Bertolt Brecht collaborations, either; we’re talking about Weill the symphonist. ‘There are so many pieces and composers throughout history still to be discovered and that deserve to be more popular,’ she enthuses. ‘It’s funny: people don’t know what they’re missing if they’ve not heard Weill’s symphonies. I always used to make a joke about Weill’s Second Symphony: Everyone loves it. Audiences love it. Orchestras love to play it – but nobody knows it!’

That might be about to change. You’ll already know Mallwitz by reputation – the energetic and energising young conductor who’s risen swiftly through Germany’s regional orchestras and opera houses to find herself, still in her thirties, in front of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. You might have caught the media flurry when in 2020 she became the first woman ever engaged to conduct an opera production (it was Così fan tutte) by the Salzburg Festival. And if you’ve spent much time in Berlin lately, you’ll certainly be aware that she’s just coming to the end of a brilliant first season as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the German capital’s ‘other’ orchestra, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin.

Mallwitz is excited about working with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin and has a passion for connecting with audiences (photography: Marco Borggreve)

But only now has she released her first recording with the Konzerthausorchester: a debut album for DG that pairs Weill’s two symphonies – the stormy, expressionistic First of 1921, and the troubled, trenchant Second (1934) – with the extraordinary, sardonic ballet chanté of 1933, Die sieben Todsünden. It’s a statement of intent. Mallwitz is a very modern kind of conductor, leading a very distinctive orchestra in a booming 21st-century metropolis. And what composer embodies modern Berlin – in all its vitality, complexity and teeming, troubled history – more perfectly than Weill, the great chronicler of the Weimar Republic era and its aftermath?

‘This is one of the reasons why I thought it would fit perfectly,’ says Mallwitz. ‘I discovered these works and I just wanted to put them out there in a recording – especially the symphonies, which are so rarely played and deserve to have more popularity. It’s our first recording together, and my first recording for DG – but it was also the moment of our beginning: the Konzerthausorchester and me starting our journey together in Berlin, this place that is so full of tradition and history.’ That’s literally true: Weill’s First Symphony featured in the opening concert of Mallwitz’s first season with the Konzerthausorchester, as recently as August 2023.

‘Actually, Kurt Weill conceived these three works in Berlin. The First Symphony was written here when Weill was a very young person, and the other two works were both started in Berlin. He then took them with him into his first exile, in Paris. But somehow everything came together for us and it just fitted that we would start our first season with a focus on this composer, and then also document these works and bring them to a larger audience with this disc. Weill cared about making music for the people. And this is something that I really feel in everyday life with the Konzerthausorchester.’

Conducting in the main hall of Berlin’s Konzerthaus with its Jehmlich organ built 1984 (photography: Marco Borggreve)

It’s still possible to watch that inaugural concert online (on DG’s streaming service, STAGE+): clearly a thrilling evening at the Konzerthaus, and a bravura piece of agenda-setting at the start of a new musical adventure. Mallwitz conducted three first symphonies – three explosions of youthful creative energy. Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony was the opener and Mahler’s First concluded the programme, with Weill placed at the centre as the representative of Berlin: like the city (and like this orchestra in particular), occupying a space between the Slavic world and the great German symphonic tradition. This being Mallwitz, that’s no coincidence.

‘I knew it would be the starting point for our adventure, and I wanted also to give the audience a little glimpse of where this journey might lead us. And, of course, I was looking back to the traditions of this orchestra. As you say, they have a big connection to the Russian repertoire – Shostakovich, but also other Russian composers. They also have a great tradition in Mahler, Bruckner – the Austro-German symphonic repertoire. The Prokofiev has humour; it has this knowledge of the past, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It has jokes, and a very chamber musical drive to it. It’s all these things that I’m looking for in music-making in general. And the Konzerthausorchester Berlin is exceptionally open to trying new things.’

In some ways, that openness is the Konzerthausorchester’s greatest strength. The orchestra was a product of the Cold War, founded in the Soviet half of the divided city in 1952. While Herbert von Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic made an international reputation in West Berlin, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra (Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester, as the Konzerthausorchester was known until 2006) served an audience that had no access to the Philharmonie. Cut off from the Western public and the post-war recording boom, it was seen by some as the Cinderella of the major Berlin orchestras, and after the Wall fell in 1989 its future looked shaky.

Mallwitz, still only in her late thirties, is continuing to attract a lot of positive attention (photography: Marco Borggreve)

By then, however, it had developed a resilience as well as a wholly distinctive sound and tradition, shaped in large part by its Chief Conductor from 1960 to 1977: Kurt Sanderling, the great friend and champion of Shostakovich. In the 21st century, another Chief Conductor, Lothar Zagrosek, observed that the orchestra’s underdog status is also, paradoxically, a liberation. While their friendly rivals across the city at the Philharmonie shoulder the responsibilities of being Germany’s showcase orchestra, planning and programming with at least one eye on a global public, the Konzerthausorchester is free to be Berlin’s own house band: experimenting, exploring and building close ties with a lively and passionately loyal local audience.

Mallwitz is aware of both the tradition and the opportunity that she’s been handed: ‘I would say the Konzerthausorchester brings together two qualities. On the one hand, it has a dark sound – a dark, symphonic sound, with a beautiful roughness which is in its DNA. But it also has a very modern and agile and flexible musical character. They’re ready to take musical risks. And these two sides of their character come together nicely – they’re connected.’

That’s just a starting point, of course, though it helps that the Konzerthausorchester – unlike many major orchestras – has its own permanent venue. It’s a stunningly beautiful one, too: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s neoclassical 19th-century theatre has weathered wars and major reconstructions but retains its elegant shoebox-shaped auditorium. ‘Yes, it’s a venue that has huge character,’ agrees Mallwitz. ‘The place itself has an energy, and it’s an energy that you can either use or break, but you can never act like it’s not there! The room has a strong personality. The acoustic is wonderful but tricky. Whatever you play, you always have to see the programme in connection to this personality of the room. But we all know how valuable and exceptional it is that here we have an orchestra and the hall together – this location where music is made, where all this is a unity. And I think this is one of the things that gives this place great power.

‘I think it’s beautiful that the orchestra really has established itself as the orchestra for the people in Berlin. There is such an intense connection with our listeners who come from the city, but there’s also a big identification with this orchestra. There’s also the way the orchestra has, in recent years, gone out into the city and tried new formats of how to play music, of how to present music, of how to reach the public.’

Mallwitz hasn’t been slow in devising a few ways of her own, either. In her previous role at the Nuremberg State Theatre she pioneered the so-called Expeditionskonzert format – involving an introduction, in words and music, to repertoire classics ranging from Schubert to Bartók. She’s brought that to Berlin too. Her pre-concert talks – given from the keyboard, complete with live demonstrations by Mallwitz herself – have been some of her happiest experiences of her first year in Berlin. ‘Before every one of my concerts, I do the talk myself from the piano. And as a result we usually have a full house one hour before the concert. Everyone is already there, listening! For me, it feels a bit like this house, this orchestra – it’s my home. And we invite all of Berlin into our wonderful living room.’

That determination to share the music – to tear down barriers, to throw open the doors, and to welcome a whole city into the Konzerthaus – is clearly something that matters deeply to Mallwitz. After all, without a series of happy chances, she might easily have missed her own vocation. Hildesheim, the small city in Lower Saxony where she grew up, is not a major musical centre; and her parents were not musicians.

‘As a kid, I didn’t go to symphony concerts. I didn’t go to the opera with my parents because we are not a family of musicians. But I played the piano from the age of three, and through the piano and also through the violin, I found my way into the musical world because as a kid you do the competitions, you do the concerts, you make friends. And my parents always supported me, and drove me to piano lessons, but this world was new to them, and to me. The moment I discovered that there’s more to music than just your instrument – that there is symphonic music, and opera and all these scores – came when I was a teenager, 13 or 14. At that moment, I decided that I had to spend my life with these scores and that I had to learn how to conduct.

‘So I joined a course in Hanover where young people who are still in normal schools could study music at the weekends. We had lessons in music theory and analysis, music history, composition – and everything. And then we were given scores to read and to analyse. One of my earliest experiences was actually Schubert – the Unfinished Symphony. We were given the score to read and our teacher asked us: “What do you read here? What do you hear in your inner ear? What is this to you?” I couldn’t stop reading and I took this little score with me everywhere. From that moment, it was just clear to me that I had to keep doing this.’

The story of Mallwitz’s early career reads like a series of very happy accidents. The conductor Martin Brauss (father of the pianist Elisabeth) was an early teacher and mentor, and Mallwitz went on to study the piano and conducting at Hanover’s Hochschule für Musik – but not for long: ‘I got my first job so early that I only spent two years in Hanover. And then, when I was 19, I started working in Heidelberg – and I learnt on the job.’ Malwitz joined the Theater und Orchester Heidelberg in 2006 as a repetiteur, working under the conductor Cornelius Meister. To call it a vertiginous learning curve is an understatement.

‘Basically, I came to Heidelberg when I was 19 and I had never conducted an orchestra. I’d had some concerts with a student orchestra for my exam, but I’d had hardly any experience. I thought, “Well, I have time to learn slowly as a repetiteur, and then maybe after some years I will conduct more and more.” But I was only there for three months when I had to jump in for the first night of a new production of Madama Butterfly. They asked me to conduct it because the Kapellmeister had fallen sick. And this was a leap in at the deep end!’ It sounds terrifying; the stuff of anxiety dreams. But the show must go on: Mallwitz stepped up and plunged in.

‘I mean, with Butterfly, honestly, I knew it by heart. I had played every rehearsal, I knew the singers, I knew everything, though I hadn’t ever been in the orchestra rehearsals – not at all. But there was no time to think about how to conduct it: you just do it. To me, it felt like playing the piece on the piano – but with everyone, not just with my 10 fingers.

‘The most important thing that came from this was that, because apparently it went quite well, they said, “OK, let’s make Joana a Kapellmeister and she can conduct regularly.” And this meant that I got to learn so much repertoire in front of the orchestra. I conducted all my first operas in Heidelberg. Usually without rehearsal, of course! I conducted Zauberflöte and Così and Giovanni and Entführung. I also conducted my first Salome there, and my first Rigoletto. Lots of Verdi and Puccini and also a lot of operetta – which is great for conducting technique!’

And the rest – well, it’s all in her standard biography: music director posts at Erfurt (from 2014) and Nuremberg (from 2018) and then on to Berlin. It’s the sort of hands-on, on-the-job musical training that you expect to read about in biographies of Mahler or Bruno Walter – but here it was, happening in the 21st century, and along the way providing Mallwitz with the kind of grounding that made the likes of Karajan, Otto Klemperer and Sir Georg Solti such peerless interpreters of symphonic repertoire. ‘It’s funny to me, because honestly, as a young person, I didn’t even know what the job of a conductor really was and how you plan a career,’ says Mallwitz. ‘But now, looking back, I would say that for me, personally, it was the perfect way, because I was learning by doing: not so much talking about conducting, but just doing it. I learnt so much repertoire in practice and not just in theory. In the Kapellmeister system where you take over performances without much rehearsal, you have to achieve for yourself a conducting technique that works. Every time I conducted an opera for the first time, it was in front of an audience. You don’t have the option of saying, “OK, stop. Sorry, I didn’t mean that!” You learn technique, technique, technique. That’s how it is. And I’m glad. I’m very lucky to have had those years in Heidelberg. It was the best school.’

But even the finest technician won’t progress without a spark of something more. It was in her subsequent posts that Mallwitz began to establish herself as an interpreter – and as exactly the kind of imaginative, energetic music director a modern orchestra or opera house needs. ‘Certain other things I could only start to learn when I had my first chief conductor post. So when I became General Music Director in Erfurt, I was suddenly in charge of the planning and the rehearsing. I had the opportunity to develop rehearsal technique. The technique of making your own ideas into everyone’s ideas is something you can only learn if you get to work with one orchestra continuously.’

Meanwhile, Mallwitz was able to hone the most complex and necessary skill of all: how to reach an audience. ‘Personally, I’ve always cared most of all about making a connection with the people that are there in the moment. So when I was in Erfurt, and then Nürnberg, and now Berlin, one of the most important aspects of my job has been not just to conduct very good music, but to be there for the whole community. You shape the cultural life of a city to a certain degree, and that’s a huge responsibility. But I feel that when you make this connection to the people, they will follow you – they will come. This happened in Nürnberg: suddenly everything was sold out and people came and celebrated us, because I care about those things. That’s also one of the reasons why I always do these pre-concert talks, and why I do the Expeditionskonzerte. I really want to take the audience on our adventures: not just present music to them, but pull them into this world and let them see how exciting it is. And now, luckily, in Berlin, the public has really caught fire. All of our concerts until the end of season became completely sold out. That’s not always been the case here. We had four sold-out concerts featuring Beethoven’s Eroica, which we presented in different ways: two regular subscription concerts, one Expeditionskonzert, and a concert where the musicians talked to the audience. Four sold-out evenings with Beethoven! This is something I’m really happy and proud of – that we’re connecting with our public and taking them places.’

Places like Weill’s Weimar Berlin, and like … well, what else can we look forward to from the Konzerthaus? More Beethoven, Shostakovich and Mahler for sure; this is a great German orchestra with a proud symphonic tradition. Mallwitz won’t give away too many future recording plans, but she’s a big fan of the music of her fellow Hanover alumna Lera Auerbach. And any music lover’s heart will give a little leap to hear Mallwitz enthusing over Haydn: ‘We will do Mozart, and a lot of Haydn. We want to really develop our style and to ask the question: “How do we play Haydn or Mozart today?” We always see and hear music of the Classical repertoire through the filter of our own time, our own sphere, our own personality, our own emotions. And this is something that’s really interesting to me.’

But whatever her plans for the next half-decade (and offers of international engagements are flooding in), Mallwitz is clear that they will be created for and grounded in this city, this concert hall, and in the unique character and boundless potential of the orchestra that bears its name. ‘There’s no other place on Earth where there is so much culture of the highest quality going on at the same time,’ she smiles. ‘On any night, a person living in Berlin can choose from 20 different classical concerts, all world-class. So Berlin people, basically, have heard everything. People warned me that they were jaded. But now that I’ve arrived, I must say that yes, they’ve seen a lot, and they really form their own opinions, but they’re also warm and enthusiastic. I’m always looking for the moment when you’re not just presenting music, but almost hugging the whole audience, and taking them with you. That’s what changes people’s lives, and makes people come back to your concerts. And I’m so happy that it’s happening in Berlin’.

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today