Biography

Hannah von Wiehler is a conductor whose work spans orchestral, operatic, and interdisciplinary music across Europe, the United States, and Asia. Born to American parents and raised in Moscow, she was shaped by two musical worlds from the start — the rigor of the Russian conservatory tradition and the breadth of an international outlook.

Her musical life began at Moscow’s State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire, where she trained for a year as a violinist. She went on to read Russian Literature at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., where, at twenty-two, she developed a program to identify and promote musical talent in the North Caucasus region in collaboration with Clive Gillinson and Carnegie Hall. From Georgetown she joined the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, serving as personal assistant to Valery Gergiev and Director of Special Projects for the Mariinsky Foundation of America — working across programming, touring, and festival production for one of the world’s great opera houses, and taking up formal conducting studies with Leonid Korchmar during this period.

Von Wiehler earned a master’s and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, writing her dissertation on the canon of Rodion Shchedrin. Her research has since appeared in the Cambridge Opera Journal.

In 2016 she founded Orchestra VOX, leading the ensemble as its Music Director for eight years and building it into an adventurous and pioneering chamber orchestra, in residence at St John’s College, Oxford. Over more than a hundred concerts, operas, and multimedia performances, she programmed UK premieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Steve Reich, and Harrison Birtwistle, staged fully produced operas including La Traviata, Eugene Onegin, and Don Giovanni, and created original interdisciplinary productions — among them Ophelia, fusing music by Hans Abrahamsen and Prokofiev with live theatre and film. Orchestra VOX also performed regularly beyond concert halls: in hospitals, hospices, homeless shelters, and refugee detention centers, reflecting von Wiehler’s belief that music must reach beyond traditional audiences.

In 2020, in response to the pandemic, she launched the CHRYSALIS Project: a multinational collaboration connecting Orchestra VOX with acclaimed filmmakers, choreographers, and composers from five countries — the UK, New Zealand, Burkina Faso, Russia, and the United States. The resulting series of short films, made across continents during a period of global isolation, was featured by The Guardian as among the best dance films of the year.

Recent seasons have taken her across Europe, Asia, and to the United States. Highlights include her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall with the Sejong Soloists, where she led the world premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’s Haemosu’s Celestial Chariot Ride; debuts with Italy’s Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, and the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto; and a season as Assistant Conductor at the Opéra National de Bordeaux. She appears frequently in the UK with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Opera Holland Park, and the London Chamber Orchestra, with whom she has recorded two albums of works by Ruth Gipps and Benjamin Britten on Three Worlds Records. Before 2022 she conducted regularly in Ukraine and Russia, including the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv and the Yakutsk State Symphony Orchestra.

She has assisted Simone Young at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. and Barbara Hannigan at the London Symphony Orchestra, trained at the Tanglewood Conducting Seminar, and served as a Visiting Conducting Fellow at the Verbier Festival. She has received coaching from Jessica Cottis and Karen Kamensek, and participated in masterclasses with Paavo Järvi and Johannes Schlaefli.

The 2025–26 season brings her debut with the Tahoe Symphony Orchestra in Verdi’s Requiem, the UK stage premiere of Offenbach’s Die Rheinnixen with Gothic Opera London, return engagements with the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, and a tour of Estonia with the Hoffman Ball Gala.