Frauke Roth on 10 years at the helm of the Dresden Philharmonic

You are celebrating 10 years as general manager of the Dresden Philharmonic this month. What are you most proud of over the last decade?

We managed to inaugurate our world class hall, the Kuturpalast, in April 2017. We completed the renovation project on schedule and for a construction cost of €100 million euros which, looking at similar projects, now seems to be almost nothing. We also inaugurated a concert organ which, alongside the famous instruments in Hofkirche, Frauenkirche and Cathedral, completes the organs of the city of Dresden. Since the hall’s completion, we have been working with our Palast organ player Olivier Latry, as well as welcoming superstar soloists of the international world over the last 10 years. During that time, we have also rejuvenated the orchestra and were delighted to do the same with our audience as well as attracting numerous new customers.

©Björn Kadenbach

Dresden Philharmonic handles the rental of the concert hall so successfully that there is practically no free space in its schedule. You also secured a hall capacity rate of 82 per cent in 2023 – what is your secret to making sure so many events remain so well-attended?

I just got the preliminary numbers from 2024, and it looks like we're now up to 89 per cent capacity, with more than 340,000 people coming through the hall. This is an overwhelming result and certainly by far the best after the pandemic. I think the two key things that led to this are building trust in the quality of our output and cultivating reliability in our collaboration with politicians, stakeholders, guests and orchestra and musicians alike.

During your tenure you have worked with Dresden's city council on the Kulturpalast culture hub – what do you feel is key to collaborating with local authorities and convincing them to invest in culture?

The Kulturpalast concert hall is the basis to all the success we could eventually create. The fact that this hall turned out to be not only a good hall, but a world class one where audiences and musicians alike felt extremely comfortable is something that we greatly benefited from. So, with that situation at hand, we then started to cultivate a very wide approach to different formats and genres, collaborating with international and local partners.

I try to involve people at a very early stage in the process so that they have the chance to think things through and enter into a dialogue. This helps stakeholders to feel that they are part of the decision-making process. We must not forget that the Kulturpalast building is very important in the city. Initially opened as a ‘House of Socialist Culture’ in 1969, it is deeply ingrained in Dresden’s DNA, so we worked to build a strong relationship with our community throughout the building project and beyond.

When you first took over leadership of the orchestra, the organisation was in a tough spot with no permanent home – how did you turn the situation around?

The hall was a stroke of luck, then it was almost by sheer luck that the orchestra’s players voted Maestro Janowski as their chief conductor and I got on with him very well. He's known worldwide for his strong leadership and his strong training in orchestral practice so very soon after his appointment there was a rumour that not only was the hall world class, but the orchestra was becoming better and better. That's how we attracted young, phenomenal players and managed to really raise the profile of the orchestra.

In 2017 I had the chance to hire highly skilled and motivated people for the team and that was a big plus yet again. In this transformative time, we needed modern skills for digitisation, new techniques, management skills, workflow practices and so forth. So not only did I have a wonderful hall, a very motivated orchestra and a wonderful chief conductor, I also had a very enthusiastic, motivated and skilled young team. I think those were the ingredients to make this story a success story.

Out of that team came ideas for new formats, such as abgeFRACKt (a casual, short concert format) and a ConcertFinder tool which matches people with the programmes which are likely to interest them.

© Simon Pauly

The ConcertFinder algorithmic tool is one of the first things I saw when opening the Dresden Philharmonic website. How did you develop this tool and what are your hopes for the ConcertFinder?

We needed to think outside of the box. In my life, I've done practically nothing but music, both making and managing, so of course I'm highly informed with regard to almost every aspect of my genre. But let's face it, most people are not because there's such a great variety of things that you can do in your free time. So we decided we had to find people from all our stakeholder communities and actually ask them. And that's what my colleagues did, they held workshops with people and asked them what they are interested in and what would inspire them to actually take action and buy a ticket. They came back with a hell of a lot of information and worked with an agency in Berlin for about a year and a half to program a tool that would help people that are not yet knowledgeable in the world of classical music to find what they might like.

You originally trained as a flautist. How do you draw on your performance experience in your everyday work with Dresden Philharmonic?

I draw on it in very many ways, and I have developed a very distinct and established feeling for quality. Whatever we do, may it be the ConcertFinder, different concert formats or choral singing for all the citizens of Dresden, we do not compromise on quality. I also think you can be more enthusiastic if you really have a deep feeling for classical music, and experience in communicating what makes it so special. I'm the captain, as it were, with regard to the standard of our orchestra and the activities that we present, but it’s something I think you cannot learn in a year or two, or just through studying, it’s such a deep and almost physical knowledge.

Dresden Philharmonic was conducted by Cate Blanchett in award-winning film Tár. How did this differ from the concert experience?

Cate Blanchett is a mega super star. It was such an amazing experience to work so closely with an artist like her and it was a once in a lifetime experience for everyone who took part.

We were working with the absolute top of the film industry; it was all very professionally laid out. Of course, the preparation for such a huge project is logistically very demanding and complex, and we must remember the whole thing took place during the pandemic, so that was really quite something; testing everyone all the time, and taking precautions. The project had such a huge impact on the Dresden Philharmonic, it was very interesting for the orchestra to see an actor portraying a conductor so well and it will always stay in the DNA of the orchestra.

The Hall was a stroke of luck, appointing Maestro Janowski was another stroke of luck, and the film was a third. We reopened the hall in 2017 and recorded Tár in 2020, so it helped to make the hall and the orchestra known worldwide. During and after the pandemic, my colleagues kept working intensely on developing social media skills for our genre, orchestra and hall. They created new stories that younger audiences seem to be interested in and, thinking outside the box, made concert formats to attract those audiences to the hall. The film helped, but it was only one part of the whole picture.

©Timm Ziegenthaler

What’s next for the Dresden Philharmonic under your leadership?

An orchestra is like a living museum. It is heavyweight on tradition and the past, but it's also a huge organism that is always developing. Now, with Sir Donald Runnicles as our next chief conductor, it is very exciting to find out where he will take the Dresden Philharmonic. He will bring new repertoire, composers and soloists, like Sir James Macmillan, who he has asked to be our next composer in residence.

During a transformative period, you need to build relationships and catch people – you can't just let them come and go. Dresden is a very traditional city and Sir Donald being a Scot, has a very different style in communicating; he's very inclusive and friendly, he talks to the audience, so we have a great chance to connect even further with our public.

I think there's still a lot to do with regard to strengthening the relationship between orchestra, and audience. For example, how do we rejuvenate subscriber systems? I think we need a more flexible model, and find a way to make the Dresden Philharmonic family bigger and let people that are not subscribers of the old sort become part of this family.

Of course, enhancing, maintaining and diversifying quality is something which always needs a lot of care and work, especially when budgets are tight, and societies are less cohesive, but third places where people of different backgrounds come together and listen to high quality music now take a very strong role. We need to have an impact on society here in Dresden and internationally and that does take time. The old western world is already well connected, but for us we're working on enhancing the connection with the Czech Republic and Prague, which is only an hour and a half from Dresden, and with Poland. I think we could play a role in being the intermediator between West and East, and I'm very much looking forward to building on that. It's a great honour to be a general manager of a heavyweight institution in the middle of a music capital like Dresden.