Omer Meir Wellber

Omer Meir Wellber was born in Be’er Sheva in 1981. He is the standing guest conductor at the Israeli Opera and has also been, since 2009, the regular conductor of the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra, founded in 1991 to help aid the integration of Jewish immigrants in Israel. Since 2011 he has been General Music Director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia in succession to Lorin Maazel, where his contract runs until 2014. Wellber also appears regularly at the opera houses in Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Venice, Milan and Verona.^[1]

Training

Wellber began his musical training at the age of five on the accordion and piano. As he was also interested in composition, he took lessons from Tania Taler from the age of nine. After that he was taught by Michael Wolpe until 2004. He graduated from the Be’er Sheva conservatoire as early as 1999. Since then his works have been performed both in Israel and abroad, and broadcast on the radio. After graduating, Wellber took advantage of a scholarship from the American-Israel Cultural Foundation to continue his studies from 2000 to 2008 under Eugene Zirlin at the Jerusalem Music Academy and in the Mendi Rodan Programme.

Already during this period he appeared with the Israeli Sinfonietta, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Haifa Symphony Orchestra and the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon Le’Zion, conducting some ten first performances of Israeli and other contemporary music. His Suite for String Orchestra, Bassoon and Clarinet no. 1 and his Mandolin Concerto were themselves given their premieres in this way. Chamber music works by him have been premiered by the Kaprisma Ensemble (Music for Ten Instruments), the Musica Nuova Ensemble (Oboe Quintet ‘The Last Leaf’) and the Vienna Amber Trio (Piano Trio and Accordion). In December 2004 Wellber conducted the Israel Chamber Orchestra in the first performance of his Viola Concerto, which he had written for Amihai Grosz of the Jerusalem Quartet.

Israeli Opera

Since 2005 Wellber has regularly appeared at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, where he has conducted, among other works, Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’, ‘La Forza del Destino’, ‘Il Trovatore’, ‘Rigoletto’ and ‘Un Ballo in Masquero’, Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ and ‘Madama Butterfly’, Ponchielli’s ‘La Gioconda’, Donizetti’s ‘L’Elisir d’Amore’, Mozart’s ‘Così fan tutte’ and ‘The Magic Flute’, Boito’s ‘Mefistofele’, Gounod’s ‘Faust’ and Janáček’s ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’. In February 2007 Wellber conducted a gala concert in Beijing with the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra. Shortly after that he made his debut with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. This was followed in October 2008 by Verdi’s ‘Aida’ at the Teatro Verdi in Padua, for which he was voted one of the new discoveries of the year by the Italian magazine.^[2]

Between 2008 and 2010 he assisted Daniel Barenboim at the Berliner Staatsoper Unter den Linden and at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.^[3] He conducted ‘Aida’ when La Scala performed at the Israeli Opera. This was followed by Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ at the Staatsoper Berlin, his first concert at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, a concert at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Strauss’s ‘Salome’ as stand-in for Seiji Ozawa at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, a new production of Strauss’s ‘Daphne’ at the Semperoper in Dresden,^[4] Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ at the Berliner Staatsoper, and symphony concerts in Verona and at La Fenice in Venice.

At the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia Wellber conducted "Aida", Tchaikovsky’s "Eugene Onegin", Donizetti’s "L’Elisir d’Amore", Mussorgsky’s "Boris Godunov", "Tosca", two works by de Falla, "La vida breve" and "El amor brujo", "Rigoletto", "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" and "I due Foscari" with Plácido Domingo. By the Vienna Festival he was entrusted with the direction of Verdi’s trilogia popolare in a three-year project, conducting "Rigoletto" (2011), "La Traviata" (2012) and "Il Trovatore" (2013). Furthermore, he conducted "Tosc"a and "Aida" at La Scala, "Tosca" at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, "La Traviata" at the Berliner Staatsoper, "Carmen" and "L’Elisir d’Amore" in Venice,^[5] "La Traviat"a at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Verdi’s "Macbeth" in Verona, "Otello" in Tel Aviv and various symphony concerts with the Orchestre de Paris, the Filarmonica della Scala, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin,^[6] the NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hannover, and the hr-Sinfonieorchester in Frankfurt. In June 2013, he conducted the jubilee performance of "Aida" with La Fura dels Baus in the Arena di Verona.

Omer Meier Wellber can be heard on CD and DVD in the aria programme ‘Gioia’ with Aleksandra Kurzak (Decca) and in Mariusz Trelinski’s production of ‘Eugen Onegin’ in Valencia (C Major).

References

• http://www.classicvoice.com/Recensioni_n150.html