British conductor John Warner is Founder and Artistic Director of Orchestra for the Earth (OE). In September John takes over as Chief Conductor of Musiktheater im Revier, Gelsenkirchen where his first season will include a new production of Wozzeck, La clemenza di Tito, Hans Thomalla’s Dark Fall, and L’amour des trois Oranges. This season also includes Le Nozze di Figaro with Oxford Opera. Until very recently John was Music Director of both Oxford Opera and Southern Sinfonia.
Recent highlights include debuts with the Athens State Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and the Franz Schubert Filharmonia, and a return to the Berliner Symphoniker at the Berliner Philharmonie and Konzerthaus. He has appeared with the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Slovak State Philharmonic, Armenian Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic, collaborating with artists including Thomas Hampson, Susan Bullock, James Ehnes, Wu Wei and Roman Simovic. In 2025 he received the Mahler Foundation’s inaugural Mahler Award at Het Concertgebouw’s Mahler Festival in Amsterdam.
In opera, Warner has conducted productions including La traviata, Die Zauberflöte, Hänsel und Gretel, Tosca, Dido and Aeneas, Die Fledermaus and The Atlantis Code (Frank Schwemmer, world premiere). His operatic work has also taken him to Glyndebourne, Palau de les Arts Valencia and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. He has championed underperformed works by women composers, leading productions of operas by Ethel Smyth and Amy Beach.
John Warner founded Orchestra for the Earth in 2018 to pair high-level performance with practical climate and biodiversity engagement. Through OE he brings music and nature together in concerts, education and touring projects developed with environmental partners. He has been invited to create and lead world premieres at the Philharmonie Luxembourg, Het Concertgebouw and the Beijing Music Festival, where he directed a residency featuring new works and Chinese premieres by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Huang Ruo, Sir George Benjamin and Messiaen.
Earlier in his career he assisted conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Karina Canellakis, Robin Ticciati and Edward Gardner with orchestras and opera houses including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Budapest Festival Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Wiener Symphoniker, Les Siècles and Glyndebourne.
Warner studied music at the University of Oxford (First Class Honours, 2016; MSt with Distinction, 2017). He won 1st Prize in the Oxford Conducting Competition (2015). He writes for The Wagner Journal, has been published by Routledge and is a guest lecturer at the Curtis Institute and Johns Hopkins University.
Musically, the production was superb. The orchestra, conducted by John Warner, delivered a beautifully rich and full sound that filled the Playhouse without ever overwhelming the singers. There is something quite special about hearing Mozart’s music performed live, and the balance between orchestra and performers was spot-on throughout.
Under conductor John Warner, the orchestra was terrific, the synergy between pit and stage palpable as they found their feet. Musically, the opening Overture never fails to amaze and astound, the power of Mozart’s brilliance captured in those fewminutes, the spirited delivery running throughout the production, the audience engaged from first scene to the last, theensuing applause rightly long and heartfelt
The orchestra plays its heart out under John Warner, givingspace to the voices and maintaining the complexity of themusical conversation. And the ensembles are attacked withpace and verve.
Triumph of musical precision, comic timing and operatic charm.....Oxford Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Oxford Playhouse was an absolute delight from beginning to end — a sparkling evening of superb singing, magnificent orchestral playing and wonderfully timed comedy.
The orchestra was magnificent under the baton of John Warner, bringing Mozart’s glorious score to life with energy, elegance and exquisite precision. Every performer was pitch-perfect, and the musical interplay between the singers and orchestra was beautifully synchronised throughout. Every note, entrance and ensemble felt impeccably judged and executed, creating a seamless and thoroughly polished performance.
The premiere on 27 September in the main auditorium also marks the debut of the young Englishman John
Warner as the new First Kapellmeister. Anyone who has already been able to look in on rehearsals could
only marvel. The brilliantly playing Neue Philharmonie Westfalen offered not only towering crescendos and
searing dissonant clashes, but also echoes of Gustav Mahler’s miraculous sound world.
After graduating in music at Oxford with top marks, John Warner founded his own ensemble, Orchestra for the Earth, in 2017. Last year, at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, he received the Mahler Foundation’s inaugural Mahler Award. What prompted him to move to “shithole” Gelsenkirchen, the “dump” as one of his compatriots disparaged the city at the last European Football Championship? “It isn’t the wealthiest city, but it has a very special opera house,” John Warner replies.
Alban Berg’s music for Wozzeck is, however, something quite special. John Warner shares Lanzino’s view. The 32-year-old Briton is the new First Kapellmeister from this season and also takes musical charge of Wozzeck. The composition is already very familiar to him. Yet he still finds it “shocking and extremely difficult”, as Warner admits. “The music is sometimes full of colour, then intensely
dramatic. Those are the contrasts I want to bring out with the orchestra,” he says of his intentions.
Naturally, the question arises why, after leaving Britain, he chose Gelsenkirchen of all places. “Because the MiR has better staffing and resources than every opera house in Britain except one in London,” comes his surprising answer. Of course, the city cannot compare with European cultural centres such as Vienna or Berlin. “But MiR Gelsenkirchen is an exciting place and exactly the right place to be now,” Warner makes clear.
he evening’s real revelation takes place in the orchestra pit. The conducting of the new First Kapellmeister, John Warner, is pure magic. From Berg’s enormously demanding score, Warner draws a veritable firework display of nuances and moods from the masterly playing of the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen. The stark contrasts between shimmering opulence of orchestral colour and shocking dramatic force are brought out with exquisite delicacy. Rarely has the MiR’s resident orchestra been heard with such sensitivity and differentiation. The moving orchestral interludes reach the limits of the bearable in their intensity. The leitmotifs, such as the
monotonously repeated “Yes, Captain”, become musical symbols of unconditional submission to the regime.
John Warner, who succeeded Giuliano Betta as First Kapellmeister at the beginning of the season, draws everything from the score: late-Romantic opulence as well as dissonant austerity. He commands the large orchestral forces with assurance, letting the extensive percussion rumble, the bass tubas thunder, the high wind notes clang, and the strings float with aching sweetness above the well-ordered chaos.
John Warner and the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen bring out the sharp edges of Berg’s score clearly. Yet it sounds like magnificent opera, almost intoxicatingly rich. It was fascinating to hear, for Warner makes all the emotional turmoil audible.
The music-making is of the highest standard. John Warner, First Kapellmeister at MiR Gelsenkirchen since the beginning of this season, gives Berg’s score an immense dramatic pull and gives full expression both to its great lyrical passages and to its dramatic outbursts
John Warner, the new First Kapellmeister at the Musiktheater im Revier, takes ample time over details at the helm of the highly focused Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, giving them vivid shape. He emphasises the chamber-music elements, but can then drive the orchestral tuttis to a dramatic peak. He interprets Berg’s
score in the spirit of late Romanticism, with much of its expressive manner recalling Gustav Mahler’s late works. He closely interweaves music and text, and the staging often responds precisely to the music. Individual phrases thus repeatedly acquire great weight, sometimes of haunting beauty, sometimes of
aggressive force.