Hannah Eisendle is a conductor, composer and pianist. All three areas have in common an orientation towards the contemporary and a desire to cooperate with artists from different fields. As a conductor, she is particularly interested in performing works from the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2023, she made her debut with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO) in the Great Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, where she had previously conducted the Austrian premiere of Britten’s Ballad of Heroes. In 2023, she conducted the music education concerts of the Tonkünstler-Orchestra, with whom she premiered her orchestral work crushed ice II at the Grafenegg Festival in 2020. She has received invitations as a guest conductor from the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra, the Wiener Concert-Verein, the Johann Strauss Festival Orchestra Vienna, the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra and as a musical assistant with the Orchestre National de France and the Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock, among others.
In accordance with her preference for collaborating with artists from different genres, an important focus of her activities lies in the opera metier. She worked for several years as a conductor and musical assistant for the youth opera at the Theater an der Wien, directed the children’s opera there and assisted with productions at the Neue Oper Wien. She was also conductor of oper rundum and musical assistant for Janáček’s Jenufa at the Théâtre National du Capitole de Toulouse. In addition to conducting Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Schönbrunner Schlosstheater, she has conducted contemporary operas by Patricia Martinez, Caitlin Smith and Manuel Zwerger. Since 2023, she has been Kapellmeister and répétiteur at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, where she made her debut with Johann Strauss‘ Die Fledermaus. For the Johann Strauss 2025 Vienna Festival, she was appointed musical director of Wiener Blut, directed by Nikolaus Habjan.
In her compositions, she is often inspired by extra-musical impressions, images and other art forms, which she transforms into sounds. One example of this is – grey –, a trio with which she won the open call of the Austrian Cultural Forum London. She came to international attention as a composer with her orchestra work heliosis, which was commissioned by the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna (RSO). In addition to additional mandates from the RSO, she has also received commissions from the Wiener Concert-Verein and the Carinthian Summer Festival, among others. In 2022, she was invited by the Vienna State Opera to compose the youth opera Elektrische Fische, which premiered in 2024.
Her orchestral works are performed under the musical direction of Marin Alsop, Giedrė Šlekytė, Joana Carneiro, Manfred Honeck and Cristian Măcelaru by orchestras such as the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, as well as under her own baton by the Tonkünstler-Orchestra, the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Concert-Verein. She is particularly keen to pass on her experience to composition students, for which her work as a university assistant at the Gustav Mahler Private University of Music in Klagenfurt offers her the opportunity.
Hannah Eisendle studied piano at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre and graduated in composition and conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She received important impulses for her work in masterclasses with Marin Alsop, Cristian Măcelaru and Johannes Schlaefli, as a Conducting Fellow at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz (CA) and as a participant in the Darmstadt Summer Courses.
Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes