Roland Böer

»si l’on veut recevoir le vrai message de Mozart, il faut écouter l’orchestre. Avec Roland Böer, on a un super chef. Il a Mozart dans le sang. Sous sa direction, l’orchestre excelle.«

Nice Martin, January 2020

Biography

Roland Böer is an international opera and orchestral conductor. Until 2020, he was Music Director for twelve consecutive years, since 2015 also Artistic Director of the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano, a festival founded by Hans Werner Henze.
Up until 2019, he was also the Principal Guest Conductor of the Mikhailovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. From the 2023/24 season on, he will be chief conductor of the Nuremberg State Philharmonic Orchestra.

From 1996 to 1999, Roland Böer was first solo répétiteur at the Oper Frankfurt, and then, from 1999 to 2002, répétiteur and conductor at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and, at the same time, personal assistant to Antonio Pappano at the Bayreuth Festival, La Monnaie in Brussels and the Royal Opera House in London, before returning to the Oper Frankfurt from 2002 to 2008 as Kapellmeister, where he has been a regular guest ever since, e. g. for Arabella, Die verkaufte Braut, Hoffmanns Erzählungen and La Damnation de Faust.

Opera

Since his debut at the English National Opera in London in 2005 with La Clemenza di Tito (production: David McVicar) and with the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome with Così fan tutte (production: Daniele Abbado), Roland Böer has been one of the most sought-after Mozart conductors of his generation.
For example, he directed productions of Die Zauberflöte at La Scala in Milan, at the Royal Opera House London and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Idomeneo and Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Oper Frankfurt, Le Nozze di Figaro at the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg, the Polish National Opera in Warsaw and at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Don Giovanni with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Thamos with the Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Così fan tutte at the Opera di Firenze.

He has given guest performances at the Komische Oper Berlin (Salome), the Theater Bonn (Der fliegende Holländer) and the Volksoper Vienna (Salome, Rusalka, Tiefland), the Teatro Regio di Torino and the Teatro Petruzzelli di Bari, the Stadttheater Bern (Hänsel und Gretel), at Opéra National du Rhin in Straßburg and the Opéra de Lyon, at La Monnaie in Brussels (L’Heure espagnole, L’Enfant et les sortilèges), the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen (Albert Herring, Tannhäuser) and the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm (Manon Lescaut, Der Rosenkavalier), the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest and the Czech National Theatre in Prague (Elektra), as well as at the New National Theatre Tokyo (Die Zauberflöte).

Roland Böer maintains a long-standing and particularly successful relationship with the Opéra de Nice. Here, he has directed exclusively new productions of Adriana Lecouvreur, Turandot (with the Berio ending), Death in Venice, Elisir d’Amore, Rigoletto, The Rake’s Progress and Così fan tutte.

He has worked with directors such as Daniele Abbado, Matelda Cappelletti, Dale Duesing, Kaspar Holten, Tilman Knabe, Christoph Loy, Francesco Micheli, Damiano Michieletto, Caterina Panti Liberovici, Hermann Schneider, David McVicar, Keith Warner and Stein Winge.

In the field of contemporary opera, he has conducted productions of Pollicino (Henze), Tri Sestri (Eötvös), Nacht (G. F. Haas) and Enrico (Trojahn), as well as the world premiere of Icarus (David Blake and Keith Warner). Planned for the upcoming season is the world premiere of the new opera by Hauke Berheide and Amy Stebbins, The People out there, commissioned by the Oper Frankfurt and together with Ensemble Modern.

Concert

Guest engagements as an orchestral conductor have led him to major European orchestras, including the Filarmonica della Scala, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and the Munich Radio Orchestra, the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, the Braunschweig State Orchestra, the Erfurt Philharmonic Orchestra and the Nuremberg State Philharmonic, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg and the Symphony Orchestra of the Mikhailovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. After his successful debut at the Tyrolean Festival Erl in December 2019 he has been contracted for further concerts in the upcoming seasons.

He has also conducted the Ensemble Modern, Northern Sinfonia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.
In addition to the main focus of his symphonic repertoire – the works of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss and Henze – Roland Böer regularly devotes himself to the performance or premieres of contemporary works, for instance by Aho, Antonioni, Glanert, Eggert, Montalbetti, Pohlit, Rudin and Vollmer.

He has worked with prestigious soloists such as Alessio Allegrini, Silvia Chiesa, Veronika Eberle, Olga Kern, Alexej Gerassimez, Claire Marie Le Guay, Danjulo Ishizaka, Janine Jansen, Christel Lee, Mischa Maisky, Francesco D’Orazio, Miklos Perenyi, Julian Rachlin, Tatiana Samouil, Heinrich Schiff, Christian Tetzlaff and Mariangela Vacatello.

Education

Roland Böer is connected with the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (RNCM) as part of an intensive collaboration that has been going for twelve years now. Each year, he compiled two to three big symphonic programmes with the RNCM Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra-in-residence of the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano, but he also developed opera productions and ensemble concerts.

For his long-standing, successful contribution to training this quasi-professional symphonic orchestra he has been awarded with an honorary fellowship of the RNCM in December 2021.

In the elite field of orchestral education he has worked with the orchestra of the Accademia della Scala in Milan and was head of a large-scale joint project with selected students from the universities of Brussels, Antwerp and Maastricht.

On several occasions he chaired juries of international singing competitions, such as "Giulio Neri" in Torrita di Siena and "Lauritz Melchior" in Aalborg, and he conducted the final concerts of the international singing competitions "Queen Sonia" and "Queen Elisabeth" in Oslo and Brussels.

Recording

His discography includes recordings for EMI and OPERA RARA (with the London Philharmonia Orchestra), for BBC Scotland (with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra) and for Bayerische Rundfunk (with the Bamberg Symphony). Roland Böer’s debut at La Scala with Die Zauberflöte (production: William Kentridge) has been released on DVD by OPUS ARTE.

The most recent CD production Werner Richard Heymann - Das symphonische Werk is a world premiere recording published by RONDEAU.

Dates

Carmen in Nurenberg

In March / April, Roland Böer takes over the direction of the Nuremberg State Theatre "Carmen" production at short notice.
>>more information

Serse in Frankfurt

In May / June, Roland Böer conducts five further performances of Handel's opera "Serse" at Oper Frankfurt.
>>more information

48th Cantiere Opening
On July 14, Roland Böer returns to Montepulciano for the opening concert of the 48. Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte with the Orchestra della Toscana.
Soloists will be violinist Helen Weiß and cellist Gabriel Schwabe.
>>program