François-Xavier Roth

The French conductor François-Xavier Roth, who was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1971 as the son of organist Daniel Roth, began his musical career as a flutist. In the mid-1990s, he decided to change his professional focus and took the conducting class of János Fürst at the Paris Conservatoire; he also enrolled in courses with Jorma Panula. After his initial experiences as Assistant Conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra, where he worked with Pierre Boulez and Sir Colin Davis, François-Xavier Roth in 2003 founded his own ensemble, Les Siècles, with which he performs works from the 17th century to the present on both old and new instruments. He has released numerous CDs with this orchestra and has garnered many awards for them; in 2020 he received the German Record Critics’ Honorary Award. From 2011 to 2016, Roth helmed the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg; he will take over as Chief Conductor of its successor, the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has merged with the RSO Stuttgart, in 2025. Since 2015 and until 2025, Roth has also served as Gürzenich Kapellmeister and General Music Director of the City of Cologne, where he conducted a new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in the spring of 2023 and will premiere Ondřej Adámek’s Ines in 2024. He has been associated with the London Symphony Orchestra as Principal Guest Conductor since 2017, and in 2018 the Paris Philharmonic appointed him “artiste associé.” François-Xavier Roth has conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Boston and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and the Orchestre de Paris. He made his debut at the Bavarian Staatsoper in 2022 with Wagner’s Lohengrin. In 2017 Roth was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Lucerne Festival debut on 10 September 2013, conducting the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg in works by Ligeti, Czernowin, Wyschnegradsky and Haas.

July 2023