Alexander Joel
Alexander Joel has been a regular guest conductor at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden since the 2012/2013 season, where he has conducted Carmen, La Traviata and La Bohème, Rigoletto and Tosca, among others. In addition, since 2001 he has been a regular guest conductor at renowned houses such as the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Semperoper Dresden, the Finnish National Opera, the former New National Theatre in Tokyo, the Den Norske Opera & Ballet, the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Cologne Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Teatro Municipale Santiago de Chile, the Boston Lyric Opera, the Royal Stockholm Opera, the Malmö Opera, the Mannheim National Theatre, the Welsh National Opera, the English National Opera, the Zurich Opera House, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Vienna Volksoper and the Opéra de Marseille. At the Wiesbaden State Theatre, he conducted the premiere of the entire Ring des Nibelungen in the production by Uwe Eric Laufenberg.
On the concert stage, he has conducted orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the Copenhagen Phil, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna.
Alexander Joel was General Music Director of the Braunschweig State Theatre and State Orchestra from 2007 to 2014. In this capacity, he conducted most of the symphonic repertoire, especially the Mahler symphonies. In the field of opera, he specialized in the German core repertoire with operas such as Salome, Lohengrin, Rosenkavalier, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. In addition, from the 2016/17 to 2018 season he was Principal Guest Conductor at the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, where he conducted highly successful productions such as Don Giovanni and Otello and covered a wide concert repertoire.
As the son of a British mother and a German father, Alexander Joel has dual citizenship. He grew up in Vienna and London and was educated in Switzerland. After a short period of study at King's College London, he returned to Vienna to study piano at the Musikhochschule. He completed his conducting studies at the Vienna Conservatory with distinction in 1996. In the same year he won a prize at the European Conducting Competition in Spoleto. 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.
As of December 2025