General Music Director Sebastian Weigle is conducting the complete Ring for the first time in his career. The cycle will be completed during the 2011/12 season with new productions of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. He will continue the series of early Wagner operas in concert this season with Das Liebesverbot/The Ban on Love in the Alte Oper (Die Feen/The Fairies was performed in 2010/11) and conduct a new production of Verdi’s Otello. He was born in Berlin and made his debut at Oper Frankfurt in 2002/03 with Salome. This was followed by a new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten for which he was named »Conductor of the Year« by Opernwelt magazine in 2003. He was General Music Director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona from 2004-2009, and took up the same position at Oper Frankfurt in the 2008/09 season. Since then he has enjoyed great success with many works, including new productions of Strauss’ Daphne, Korngold’s Die tote Stadt (now available on CD - Oehms Classics), Reimann’s Lear (Oehms Classics CD now available), Strauss’ Arabella and Strauß’ Die Fledermaus (which was broadcast live on TV), revivals of Parsifal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Fidelio, Tristan und Isolde and Die Zauberflöte. In the summer of 2011 he conducted Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Bayreuther Festival for the fifth year running. He also enjoyed enormous success as Staatskapellmeister of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, at the Semperoper in Dresden, the Vienna State Opera, the Cincinnati and Sydney operas and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Sebastian Weigle is also much in demand for concert work and orchestras with whom he has worked include the RSO in Stuttgart, the Konzerthausorchester in Berlin, the Staatskapelle in Berlin and Dresden, the RSO in Vienna and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo.