Evan Rogister Principal Conductor
Evan Rogister is Principal Conductor of Washington National Opera and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra. With artistic endeavors ranging from Mozart with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to Wagner’s complete cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Terence Blanchard’s contemporary masterpiece, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Rogister—a dual citizen of the United States and Germany—is one of the most eclectic and versatile conductors on the international scene.
Rogister returns to The Metropolitan Opera in the 2023–2024 season to lead Terence Blanchard’s Grammy Award®–winning work Fire Shut Up in My Bones . He will also conduct the Met Opera’s 2024 Laffont Competition Grand Finals Concert. Across the 2023–2024 season, Rogister returns to the Semperoper Dresden for multiple series of Die Zauberflöte performances. Additional highlights this season include a new production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet for Washington National Opera, directed by Simon Godwin, and concerts with the Badische Staatskapelle.
During the summer of 2023, Rogister made a critically acclaimed debut at the Glyndebourne Festival, leading the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Mozart’s Don Giovanni . The Telegraph hailed “the excellent debut conductor Evan Rogister” whose performance Musical America called “top-notch.” Opera Magazine concurred that “The OAE played with sharpness and elan under the intensely theatrical guidance of Evan Rogister. The accompagnato that precedes Anna’s ‘Or sai chi l’onore’ in Act 1 was…steered by Rogister with such penetrating insight into the feelings packed into a short span by Da Ponte and Mozart that my eyes filled with tears of emotion, before the aria had even started.”
Equally at home on the concert stage as in the pit, recent symphonic projects include collaborations with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic, l’Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Essen Philharmoniker, the Mälmo Symphony Orchestra, the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Dedicated to nurturing new works, Rogister led performances of WNO’s American Opera Initiative in 2023, premiering three works by emerging composers and librettists. In addition to his collaboration in 2024 with the Met’s Laffont Competition, Rogister is committed to fostering the next generation of performers, regularly leading masterclasses and coaching young artists. At WNO, he has initiated a partnership with the George Solti Foundation, enabling one of their young conductor laureates to be mentored during a production at the Kennedy Center.
From 2018–2022, Rogister conducted the Göteborg Opera’s inaugural cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen . The multiyear collaboration with director Stephen Langridge culminated in a new production of Götterdämmerung during the 2021–2022 season, coinciding with the 400th Anniversary of Gothenburg. In addition to Der Ring des Nibelungen , Rogister has conducted
three other works by Wagner: Tannhäuser (Deutsche Oper Berlin); Rienzi (Deutsche Oper Berlin); and Lohengrin (Bolshoi Theatre and Royal Swedish Opera).
Additional highlights of the 2022–2023 season included Rogister’s Semperoper debut and a new production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra at the Kennedy Center. The Washington Post hailed, “Rogister’s steering of the music’s violent weather had me loosening my tie, and his finely attuned management of its mess of motivic gestures and granular details was superb.”
The breadth of Rogister’s repertoire is represented by other recent productions, including Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s Erwartung in double bill (Göteborg Opera and Seattle Opera); Szymanowski’s King Roger (The Santa Fe Opera); André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Lyric Opera of Chicago); new productions of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (Royal Swedish Opera and Spoleto Festival USA); Verdi’s Otello (Berlin and Luxembourg), Aida (WNO), and Rigoletto (Lyric Opera of Chicago); and Peter Stein’s new production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (Malmö Opera). Rogister made his Metropolitan Opera debut during the 2017–2018 season, conducting Mozart’s The Magic Flute .
Rogister’s debut recording with Deutsche Grammophon, Follow, Poet , was released in January of 2015. The album features new works by the composer Mohammed Fairouz written for mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, with Rogister conducting the Ensemble LPR. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Rogister recorded a pioneering experience, Beethoven in Virtual Reality: Fidelio , in partnership with the Washington National Opera and Austin Opera.
Evan Rogister currently resides in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Synne, and two children.