Alexander Soddy

Soddy is related to Frederick Soddy, Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 1921.

Alexander Soddy (born 20 December 1982) is a British conductor and pianist.

After graduating in 2004, he was engaged as a répétiteur and conductor at the National Opera Studio in London, where he was supported by the Friends of Covent Garden and the Scottish Opera.

In October 2005, Soddy became répétiteur at the Hamburg State Opera and, after only a short time, first musical assistant to general music director Simone Young.

In the 2008–09 season, he made his debut there with Mozart's Magic Flute and subsequently conducted among others La bohème, Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, La traviata, Lucia di Lammermoor as well as Gounod's Faust and Bizet's Carmen.

Engagements followed at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (Die Zauberflöte, La bohème), the Berlin State Opera (Die Zauberflöte, Der Freischütz) and the Royal Swedish Opera (La bohème, Madama Butterfly).

From 2010 to 2012, he was engaged as Kapellmeister at the Hamburg State Opera.

Soddy was born in Oxford and trained as a chorister at Magdalen College in his home town before beginning his conducting and vocal studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

At the same time he was a piano student of the pianist and chamber music expert Michael Dussek.

Subsequently, Soddy studied musicology and music analysis at Cambridge on a choral scholarship from Selwyn College.

From 2010 to 2012, he was engaged as Kapellmeister at the Hamburg State Opera.

From 2013 to 2016, he was chief conductor at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt.

From 2013 to 2016, he was chief conductor at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, where he led among others the new productions of Der Rosenkavalier and Macbeth.

In the new production of the Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival from 2013 to 2015, he took over the musical study direction alongside Kirill Petrenko.

In the 2014–15 season, Soddy made his debut at the Oper Frankfurt and the Cologne Opera.

Since the 2016–17 season, Soddy has been general music director at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and in this capacity also artistic director of the Musikalische Akademie des Nationaltheater-Orchesters Mannheim.

Since the beginning of the 2016–17 season, Soddy has been General Music Director at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and has conducted the premieres of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, Schumann's Genoveva, Beethoven's Fidelio and Mozart's Don Giovanni as well as numerous revivals, including Hansel and Gretel, Madama Butterfly, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Parsifal.

Under his direction, a large-scale Bruckner cycle will be performed.

He also champions works rarely heard in Germany such as Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and the premiere of symphonic commissions.

In the 2017–18 season, followed his debut at houses such as New York's Metropolitan Opera with Puccini's La bohème, at the Semperoper Dresden with Weber's Freischütz, at the Vienna State Opera with Il barbiere di Siviglia as well as at the English National Opera with Britten's A Midsummer Nights’s Dream.

In the 2018–19 season, Soddy conducted the new productions of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (directed by Nigel Lowery) and Pelléas et Mélisande (directed by Barrie Kosky) at the Nationaltheater Mannheim.

He has also conducted at the Bayerische Staatsoper and Staatsoper Unter den Linden; in addition to the Academy Concerts in Mannheim, concert engagements have taken him to Germany and the US.

Soddy lives in Mannheim with his wife, the soprano Trine Wilsberg Lund, and two daughters.

His parents and two siblings live in Oxfordshire and London, England.