Anna Handler
About this Artist
Anna Handler is a German-Colombian conductor and pianist who grew up in Munich. She has recently been named a Dudamel Fellow by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the 2023/2024 season.
Handler graduated from the Juilliard School, New York in May 2023 where she received mentorship from David Robertson and was the proud recipient of the Juilliard Kovner Fellowship for outstanding students of classical music, which she was the first conductor ever to receive.
In the 2023/24 season Handler will return to the Salzburg Festival to conduct a production of L'enfant et les sortilèges. This follows her debut last summer as director of the Káťa Kabanová opera camp, after which she received an immediate re-invitation. Further highlights include her debut with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Grazer Philharmoniker and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester. The 2022/23 season saw her debut with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Sinfonieorchester Liechtenstein, the OFUNAM Orchestra in Mexico and the Mecklenburgische Staatskapelle Schwerin.
She has already worked as an assistant to renowned conductors such as Kirill Petrenko where she also conducted the incidental music for the concert opera production "Mazeppa" with the Berliner Philharmoniker. She assisted Daniel Harding with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk, Barbara Hannigan, Manfred Honeck, Mei-Ann Chen and Simone Young. At the Bayerische Staatsoper, she assisted Oksana Lyniv in the opera productions "Mauerschau" and "Greek" and took over the musical direction of the youth production “Eve and Adam”, which premiered as part of the 2019 Münchner Opernfestspiele.
As founder and director of the Ensemble "Enigma Classica", she performs with notable soloists such as Arabella Steinbacher, Daniel Müller-Schott and Sabine Meyer. Together with her team at Enigma Classica, Anna presented an interdisciplinary project on music education, using video animations in real time at the Young Artist Festival Bayreuth in August 2022. She was awarded the Maria Ladenburger Förderpreis in cooperation with WDR, the Cusanuswerk Foundation and Deutsche Grammophon. She also received the Rising Star Award from the European Cultural Foundation Europamusicale.
Handler studied piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, the Accademia Pianistica di Imola and the Folkwang University of the Arts, working with professors such as Ingrid Fliter, Pavel Gililov and Henri Sigfridsson. She went on to study orchestral conducting with Nicolás Pasquet and Ekhart Wycik at the Hochschule für Musik "Franz Liszt" Weimar between 2018 and 2021.