Walter Sutcliffe
Händel Festival Halle - Agrippina
This ‘Agrippina’ brilliantly reveals Händel's skillful technique of reusing his own music … while Sutcliffe's imaginative staging resurrects the centuries-old political satire as a vibrant, contemporary spectacle.
Deutschlandfunk, Uwe Friedrich (07.06.2025)
Oper Halle - Der Rosenkavalier
Walter Sutcliffe adds playful and even provocative elements to a story that is already complete with text and music. He directs with great attention to detail without losing the overall narrative.
TdZ.de (March 2023)Representation
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Season 25/26 and Highlights
OPER HALLE
Bizet - Carmen
PREMIERE Sep 20
Handel - Rinaldo
PREMIERE June 5
Biography
Walter Sutcliffe is an internationally active director and artistic director.
In the 2025/26 season, he will direct new productions of Carmen and Rinaldo at the Oper Halle , where he has been artistic director since the 2021/22 season. Most recently, he staged The Magic Flute , The Tales of Hoffmann , and La Bohème there, as well as Agrippina at the Handel Festival.
His work has taken him to Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Osnabrück, Magdeburg, Tallinn, Santiago de Chile, Toulouse, Turin and Buenos Aires, among other places.
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From 2017 to 2020, he was Artistic Director of Northern Ireland Opera, where he multiplied audience numbers, revenues and fundraising achievements with the highest level of public approval.
He has received international attention for productions such as Faust (Karlsruhe), Rodrigo (Händel Festival Göttingen), Agrippina (Grange Festival), Ghost Sonata and Owen Wingrave (Frankfurt), Tiefland and The Turn of the Screw (Toulouse), Otello (Turin), Rigoletto (Santiago de Chile and Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires), Manon Lescaut (Osnabrück), Così fan tutte and Carmen (Tallinn), Don Giovanni and Orpheus in the Underworld (Osnabrück), Luisa Miller and La Traviata (Braunschweig), Albert Herring (Linz) and Tsar and Carpenter (Bremerhaven).
Other stops included Le Grand Macabre (Chemnitz), Werther and Kiss me, Kate (Magdeburg), L'Orontea (Frankfurt), Šárka (Dicapo Opera New York), The Knot Garden (Klangbogen Festival Vienna), The Soldier's Tale (BAC London), as well as the theatre productions The Great Highway (Gate Theatre London) and The Lady's Not for Burning (Finborough Theatre London).
Walter Sutcliffe, born in London in 1976, studied bassoon at the Royal College of Music and history at Cambridge. He initially worked as a directing assistant at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and founded the New Professionals Opera in London. As a translator, he translated plays and libretti from French and German into English. He is a fellow of the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Italian Cultural Institute.
2025/26
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