ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AND PRINCIPAL CONDUCTOR

Hannah von Wiehler

Raised in Moscow, trained at Georgetown and Oxford, and seasoned on podiums from Carnegie Hall to the Opéra National de Bordeaux, Hannah von Wiehler begins a three-year tenure (2026–2029) as TOCCATA's Artistic Director and Principal Conductor with the 2026–2027 season.

Appointed following a national search, von Wiehler is the first full-time Artistic Director appointment in TOCCATA's history, chosen by the Board of Directors to lead the orchestra and chorus into a new era.

Photo: Vienna Storycraft

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 from the start by two musical worlds: 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 as a violinist, before she read Russian Literature at Georgetown University. At twenty-two, in partnership with Clive Gillinson and Carnegie Hall, she built a program to find and nurture musical talent in the North Caucasus.

From Georgetown she joined the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg as personal assistant to Valery Gergiev and Director of Special Projects for the Mariinsky Foundation of America. With Gergiev's encouragement she turned toward the podium, and in 2021 completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar; her scholarship in Soviet opera continues, with research published in the Cambridge Opera Journal.

For eight years she served as Founder and Music Director of the United Kingdom's Orchestra VOX, leading more than one hundred concerts, operas, and multimedia works of her own design, and championing music as a force for social good. Under her direction the orchestra performed not only in concert halls but in hospitals, shelters, nursing homes, and refugee centers.

Recent seasons have brought her debut at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall with the Sejong Soloists, 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 has assisted Barbara Hannigan and Simone Young, and trained at Tanglewood and the Verbier Festival.

Though Russian music remains her first love, her repertoire spans the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with a particular passion for contemporary opera. Previously based between New Haven and London with her husband and young son, she is now eager to make a new home in the Tahoe area.

Her vision for TOCCATA

An orchestra is strongest when it is unmistakably of its place. Hannah's aspiration is that TOCCATA grows, over time, into the kind of ensemble a region treasures as its own, the way New York holds its Philharmonic and Chicago its Symphony: rooted here, and admired well beyond.

Her approach rests on partnership. Rather than waiting for audiences to come to a single hall, TOCCATA will go to the places that make this region what it is, turning galleries, amphitheaters, and historic sanctuaries into rooms where the whole community can gather.

Her debut season, HUMAN, is the first expression of that vision: four themed concerts on what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines, alongside the traditions that anchor the year and Tahoe's first opera.