Alexander Soddy

The British conductor Alexander Soddy was General Music Director of the Mannheim National Theater from 2016 to 2022, and further Artistic Director of the city’s “Akademiekonzerte'' through the 2022/23 season, when he also took the theater’s production of Wagner’s Ring on tour to South Korea and completed a large-scale Bruckner cycle. In the 2023/24 season, Soddy’s guest conducting will be focused in Europe's most important opera houses. To begin he will lead Kirill Serebrennikov’s new production of Lohengrin at the Opéra national de Paris, after which he will end the calendar year with an extended presence at the Vienna State Opera where he will conduct Otello, Elektra, and Haensel and Gretel. In the second half of the 2023/24 season Soddy will remain at the Vienna State Opera to conduct a new production and the Viennese premiere of Animal Farm by composer Alexander Raskatov, alongside performances of Carmen and Parsifal. Later he travels to Berlin to conduct Lohengrin at the Staatsoper unter den Linden, and then on to London to lead Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Elsewhere in the season, Soddy will make his debuts with the Orchestra dell´Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Sinfonieorchester Bern.

As GMD in Mannheim, Soddy’s focus was on the core German and Italian opera repertoire. Among numerous other titles he conducted Tristan and Isolde, The Flying Dutchman, The Ring of the Nibelungen, Tannhäuser, Parsifal, Salome, Der Rosenkavalier, Tosca, La Bohème, and Turandot there. Highlights of his 2022/23 season included his debut with London’s Philharmonia on Bruckner’s 6th Symphony, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra on Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony and the Copenhagen Philharmonic on Dvorak’s 7th Symphony. Elsewhere that season he made highly successful debuts at London’s Royal Opera with Salome and Tannhäuser, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Elektra, and at the Tokyo Nikikai Theatre with La Traviata. Also during that season he returned to the Vienna State Opera with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Magic Flute, Elektra and Carmen, as well as to the Berlin State Opera with Madama Butterfly and Der Rosenkavalier.

Concert invitations in recent seasons have taken him to the Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg, the Niedersächsische Staatsorchester Hannover, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, the Royal Swedish Orchestra, the Norwegian National Opera Orchestra, the Orquestra de Valencia, the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.

In 2017 Soddy debuted at the Metropolitan Opera with La Bohème in 2017 after which he was re-invited for Madama Butterfly in spring 2022. In the past few seasons, he has regularly conducted at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (Die Zauberflöte, La bohème) and at the Berlin State Opera (Die Zauberflöte, Der Freischütz, la Bohème, Fidelio). Since his successful 2018 debut (Barbiere), Soddy has become a favorite guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera having led Elektra, Salome and Carmen on multiple occasions, while some of his other guest engagements have taken him to the Oper Frankfurt (Warten auf heute by Schönberg/Martin), the Royal Swedish Opera (La Bohème, Madama Butterfly), the Semperoper in Dresden (Der Freischütz) and the English National Opera (Midsummer Night’s Dream).

From 2013 to 2016 Soddy was chief conductor at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, where he led a.o. new productions of Der Rosenkavalier and Macbeth. From 2010 to 2012 he was engaged as Kapellmeister at the Hamburg State Opera, where he had debuted in the 2008/09 season with Mozart's Magic Flute and went on to conduct such titles as La Bohème, Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, La Traviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, Faust and Carmen a.o.

Soddy was born in Oxford and received his education at the Royal Academy of Music, Cambridge University and at the National Opera Studio in London.