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    Michael Sanderling

    conductor

    Vita

    Since 2021, Michael Sanderling has been Principal Conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, with the aim of developing its repertoire towards late Romanticism and composers such as Bruckner, Mahler, and Strauss. Born in Berlin in 1967, the son of double bassist Barbara Sanderling and conductor Kurt Sanderling, he launched his career as an internationally successful cellist. Michael Sanderling began his conducting career in 2000. His first position as principal conductor was with the Kammerakademie Potsdam, where he served as Artistic Director from 2006 to 2010. Sanderling helmed the Dresden Philharmonic from 2011 to 2019 and has appeared as a guest conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. In the 2025-26 season, he will return to the Berliner Philharmoniker, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and will conduct the Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Konzerthaus Orchestra Berlin, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. With the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, Sanderling has toured to Asia, South America, and Germany. In Lucerne and Vienna and at the Pompeii Theatrum Mundi Festival, he has performed Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony to William Kentridge’s animated film Oh To Believe in Another World. Sanderling’s recordings include the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Shostakovich with the Dresden Philharmonic. With the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, he recorded a complete Brahms cycle in 2023 and, in 2024, the piano concertos of Schumann and Grieg, with Elisabeth Leonskaja as the soloist. A passionate advocate for the younger generation, he teaches at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and works regularly with the German National Youth Orchestra, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra.

    Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut as a cellist on 26 August 1989 with the Trio Ex Aequo in a program of works by Beethoven, Paul, and Shostakovich. He first ­appeared here as a conductor in summer 2021

    July 2025