Jörg Widmann

Jörg Widmann maintains a dual reputation as both clarinetist and composer while also pursuing conducting and maintaining a prominent role in music education. Born in Munich on June 19, 1973, he began clarinet studies in 1980 and soon displayed compositional promise, receiving early guidance from Kay Westermann. He joined the Hochschule für Musik in Munich as a clarinet student in 1986. During the mid-1990s he divided his time between Germany and the United States, working with Charles Neidich on clarinet at New York’s Juilliard School and studying composition in Munich under Hans Werner Henze and Wilfried Hiller before continuing composition lessons in Karlsruhe with Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg to teach clarinet, later assuming composition duties there in 2009.

His growing stature as a composer was reflected in several distinctions, among them Opernwelt magazine’s designation of his opera Das Gesicht im Spiegel as the most significant world premiere of the 2003-2004 season and the 2006 Claudio Abbado Composition Award conferred by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Academy. Prestigious residencies followed at the Lucerne Festival in 2009, the Rheingau Music Festival in 2014, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra from 2017 to 2018; in 2019-2020 he occupied the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and he has also served as composer-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. For the 2020 online Festival of New Music he created the piece empty space, specifically conceived for the unoccupied Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin.

Widmann’s output spans an unusually broad stylistic spectrum, ranging from fully tonal writing to passages devoid of pitch. A 2018 Bachtrack survey placed him third among the most frequently performed living composers worldwide, behind only Arvo Pärt and John Williams. As a clarinetist he has championed both new music and standard repertoire, collaborating on commissions with Rihm, Aribert Reimann, and Heinz Holliger; he has also appeared in recital with the Hagen Quartet. In 2017 he was appointed principal conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. More than sixty of his works have been recorded, with particular attention given to his cycle of four string quartets. He has released over twenty discs as a solo clarinetist on the Orfeo, Harmonia Mundi, and Wergo labels, encompassing both contemporary and traditional literature. His 2020 ECM recording paired Brahms’s clarinet sonatas with pianist András Schiff and also featured Widmann’s Five Intermezzi for piano. In 2024 he returned on Myrios Classics with an album presenting both his performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, and the premiere recording of his own Clarinet Quintet. He occupies the Edward Said Chair in Composition at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin.