The conductor Joana Mallwitz mixes intensity with the accessible

The conductor Joana Mallwitz apologized for her late arrival for her interview at the Metropolitan Opera last week, but she needed to catch her breath after the rehearsal. “Driving is sweaty,” she said, while she settles in a straight back posture on a sofa in the press room, her striking hands with long, elegantly crossed fingers on the wrists.

On Monday, Mallwitz, 39 – the Musical Director of Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest classic stars of her native Germany – made her debut with “The Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart. She is in close contact with this opera since her first job, at 19, at the Heidelberg theater, a small house where her tasks understood “everything we do as Kapellmeister”, she said: repeating the singers, playing the continuo part on the harpsichord and, if necessary, jumping in a short term to carry out a performance.

“You are developing a relationship with such work,” she said about “Figaro”. “You get to know yourself.”

At the end of the rehearsal this afternoon, she had worked with the orchestra on tiny details in the opening, the finesse of dynamic contrasts and highlighting the value of shock-“like rock music”, she told musicians-noisy explosions that interrupt the bubbly fast notes. The key, she said later, was to “bring a certain energy in the sound which does not become difficult when the game becomes stronger”.

Working with the musicians puts, she said, was a joy because after having refined a small section, “they are able to feel what my style is and to transfer it” to the rest of the room. “They are able to pick it up because they are also virtuoso,” she said. “This is incredible what this orchestra is capable of delivering in terms of tempo, transparency and diversity of effects. You want to shoot it all, but also get a combination of lightness and drama. ”

Lightness and drama, supplies and seriousness without compromise in its approach to a partition – these are at the heart of the rise of Mallwitz in a profession for a long time dominated by men. In 2014, at 28, she became the music director of Theater Erfurt, the youngest conductor to occupy such a position in Europe. In 2018, she resumed the management of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution which had also served as a springboard for the conductor Christian Thielemann at the age of 23. During her second season there, she was elected the best conductor of the year by a jury of German criticism. A famous series of Mozart’s “Cosí Fan Tutte” in Salzburg in 2020 catappered it to international attention.