François-Xavier Roth will take on the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the SWR Symphony Orchestra for the 2025/2026 season. He succeeds Teodor Currentzis, who has headed the orchestra since 2018 and will remain associated with it in the future. Currentzis’ contract was extended by three years to 2024 last year. Apparently it was already clear at this point that there would be no further extensions after that. The decision was made long before Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and has nothing to do with the financial connections that Currentzis maintains with Russia through his ensemble MusicAeterna. The decisive factor was probably that Curretzis spent a lot of time on his own ensembles – on October 4th he will conduct the first concert with his new ensemble Utopia – and little on the SWR Orchestra.
François-Xavier Roth is the current general music director of the city of Cologne, directs the Gürzenich Orchestra and the Cologne Opera in this function, and is also principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. He wants to fulfill his contract in Cologne, so he will not start until 2025, so the SWR Symphony Orchestra will not have a chief conductor for a year. From 2011 to 2016, François-Xavier Roth was chief conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, which merged with the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra to form the SWR Symphony Orchestra in 2016. His contract, starting in 2025, will initially run for five years, and he will work with the SWR Symphony Orchestra for 14 weeks per season. As early as the 2024/2025 season, Roth will be the designated chief conductor for several concert projects at the podium of the SWR Symphonieorchester.