A profound faith in the music − Marie Jacquot’s debuts and reunions starting in summer 2025
Marie Jacquot repeatedly stresses that the music is at the focus of her work all the time, whether she is preparing, rehearsing or giving concerts. She always puts not just her technical conducting skills but also her musical and contextual insights at the service of each respective composition. After all, she learnt her “job” from the bottom up. From 2016-2019, she was the first Kapellmeisterin and deputy to the general music director at the Mainfranken Theater Würzburg. Then, from 2019-2022, she was Kapellmeisterin at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf/Duisburg. In the 2024/2025 season, she moved on to Copenhagen as the new principal conductor of the Royal Danish Orchestra. But she has kept her feet on the ground throughout. “I try not to let myself be torn along by the pace of our society,” says the musician, who was born in Paris in 1990 and completed her conducting studies in Vienna. As she sees it: “I want time to develop as a musician and a person.”
Concerts with WDR Sinfonieorchester, DSO Berlin and Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden
On June 14, Marie Jacquot will begin the second half of her year of concerts, lighting a musical beacon in Cologne that points the way forward. There is great anticipation, as she will be taking on the direction the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne from the 2026/27 season. Other concerts in June will take Marie Jacquot to Ingolstadt, Berlin and Dresden. On June 21, she will visit the Stadttheater Ingolstadt with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO). The programme there will feature Vivian Fung’s “Earworms”, Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto (soloist: Midori) and the “Gaelic Symphony” by Amy Beach. The conductor can be experienced on June 22 at the Philharmonie in the DSO’s home city of Berlin with the same works. On June 25, she will be conducting the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden in the Kulturpalast. There, on the eve of the International Shostakovich Festival Gohrisch, she will lead performances of Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture”, his two piano concertos (soloist: Kirill Gerstein; trumpet in Piano Concerto No. 1: Helmut Fuchs) and Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2. The concert will be recorded and broadcast on July 21 on MDR Klassik.
BBC Proms debut
After the summer break, a self-declared dream will at last be fulfilled for Marie Jacquot: on August 28, she will make her debut at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. She describes this performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra as a “very important step” in her career. The programme includes, among other things, Bizet’s orchestral suite “L’Arlésienne” and Sarasate’s “Carmen Fantasy” with the South Korean violinist Inmo Yang. Speaking of the rest of the programme, the conductor says, “With Augusta Holmès’ symphonic poem ‘Andromède’, we are performing an impressive composition that, unjustly, is little played.” The programme ends with Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, the so-called “Organ Symphony”. “This is perhaps the work I have conducted the most often and one that enthrals me every time afresh,” says Marie Jacquot.
