Highlights of Joel’s 2018/19 season include conducting a run of the beloved Jonathan Miller production of La bohème for English National Opera – also a house debut. He will return to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden to conduct Tosca with a cast including Bryn Terfel as Scarpia, and Kristine Opolais and Angela Gheorghiu sharing the role of Tosca. His season opens with the Andreas Homoki production of Verdi Luisa Miller for Staatsoper Hamburg, followed by his symphonic debut with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra at the Concertgebouw.
Joel made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2012 and has been a regular guest ever since, conducting productions of Carmen, La traviata, Rigoletto, and La bohème. Other operatic highlights have included new productions of Manon Lescaut for Dutch National Opera, Madama Butterfly at the Staatsoper Hamburg (available on DVD with Arthaus), Verdi Macbeth at the Royal Danish Opera, Rigoletto and Madama Butterfly at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, and Faust at the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden. He is also a regular guest at houses such as Bayerische Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Semper Oper Dresden, Finnish national Opera, New National Theatre in Toyko, and Den Norske Opera, Deutsche Opera am Rhein, Oper Koln, Hamburg Staatsoper, Teatro Municipale Santiago di Chile, Boston Lyric opera, Royal Opera Stockholm, Volksoper Wien, and Opera de Marseilles.
On the concert platform, he is a regular guest with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande after his work with them at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the WDR Rundfunkorchester, Duisburger Philharmoniker, Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Montpellier, Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano, BBC Philharmonic, and RSO Wien.
Joel held the position of Generalmusikdirektor of the Staatstheater and Staatsorchester Braunschweig from 2007 to 2014 where he conducted most of the symphonic repertoire, with his emphasis being the Mahler Symphonies (Mahler’s Symphony No.1 available on CD at Corvello Classics) and the German/Austrian repertoire including Bruckner, Brahms and Beethoven. In the opera field, he specialised in the core German repertoire with operas such as Salome, Lohengrin, Rosenkavalier, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.
Son of a British mother and a German father, Alexander Joel is a dual national who grew up in Vienna and London and was educated in Switzerland. After studying French and English Law at King's College in London, he moved back to Vienna to study piano at the Academy of Music, before completing his conducting studies at the Vienna Conservatory of Music with honours in 1996. He was a prize winner at the European Conducting Competition in Spoleto that same year. After various Kapellmeister positions in Baden, Klagenfurt and the Vienna Volksoper, Joel was First Kapellmeister at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein from 2001 to 2007.
2018/19 season / 539 words. Not to be altered without permission