Prof. Jörg Halubek

Jörg Halubek is a conductor, maestro al cembalo and organist. He founded the baroque orchestra il Gusto Barocco in 2008, which he has led ever since. He is Professor of Organ and Historical Keyboard Instruments at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts and Artistic Director of the International Handel Academy Karlsruhe. In 2004 he won first prize for organ at the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig.

In the 2025/26 season he conducts Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at Theater Basel and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, premiered as part of the SWR Festival. A particular focus is the Stuttgart series Metamorphosen by il Gusto Barocco, where he directs the opera projects Bajazet as an opera pasticcio and Dafne in a version after Jacopo Peri and Marco da Gagliano. With the ensemble he also appears at the Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival and the SWR Festival. At the Stuttgart Opera School he conducts a production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with students of his newly founded programme Maestro al Cembalo, staged at the Wilhelma Theater.

The 2024/25 season opened with the CD release of Johann Sigismund Kusser’s opera Adonis (cpo), rediscovered by Halubek and il Gusto Barocco in 2022; its stage premiere took place at the “Winter in Schwetzingen” Baroque Festival of Theater Heidelberg. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised him as “not only a connoisseur of early music, but above all a champion for this work.” He made his debut at the SWR Schwetzingen Festival with the staged first performance of Johann Christian Bach’s Amor vincitore with Julia Lezhneva and Maayan Licht – available as a live video in the ARD Mediathek – with a new composition by Patrick Schäfer replacing the lost ballet music. In Lucerne, following Giustino, he conducted a double bill pairing Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero (twelve-tone composition) with Zelenka’s Requiem in D major. Most recently he was artist in residence at the Ansbach Bach Week. His recent CD releases include Bach’s Art of Fugue (Berlin Classics), arranged for cornetts, trombones, woodwinds, strings and organ, and the world premiere of Antonia Bembo’s opera L’Ercole amante (cpo), a previously unperformed work by the Italian composer active in 17th-century Paris.

Earlier engagements as conductor and maestro al cembalo have taken him to the Komische Oper Berlin, the Handel Festival Halle, Theater Basel, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, as well as to leading baroque orchestras such as the Freiburger Barockorchester and La Cetra Basel. He has also collaborated with numerous German opera and symphony orchestras, working together to develop historically informed performance practice. At the Nationaltheater Mannheim he conducted the four-part Monteverdi cycle in productions by Markus Bothe, Lorenzo Fioroni and Calixto Bieito. In 2019 he conducted the first historically informed and staged performance of a Handel opera in Ukraine with Open Opera Ukraine: Acis and Galatea in the staging by Tamara Trunova.

As an organist, Halubek has been active internationally since his Leipzig competition success; concert invitations have taken him to many major organs in European cities as well as to Russia, Georgia and China. A central project is Bach Organ Landscapes, in which he performs and documents the complete organ works of Bach on historic organs of the Bach regions. The project is being released in a series of ten double CDs on Berlin Classics and will be completed in 2026 with a comprehensive online database.

Born in Beckum, he studied church music and organ in Stuttgart and Freiburg with Jon Laukvik and harpsichord with Robert Hill. At the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis he specialised in historical performance practice with Jesper Bøje Christensen and Andrea Marcon.