Florian Wiegand was born in Munich in 1973 and has been the Munich Philharmonic’s Executive Director since 2025. From 2012 to 2025 he was director of concerts at the Salzburg Festival, and from 2016 also the head of its media department. During this time, he played a key role in shaping the festival’s concert programme. This included establishing the renowned »Ouverture Spirituelle« series that kicks off each festival and creating composer features, including Pierre Boulez, Galina Ustvolskaya, Pascal Dusapin, George Enescu, Morton Feldman, Beat Furrer, Gérard Grisey and Wolfgang Rihm. As head of media, he was responsible for the festival’s audio and audiovisual recordings and broadcasts on radio, television and streaming sites as well as the publication of recordings in the »Salzburg Festival Documents«. In the anniversary summer of 2020, Florian Wiegand was responsible for the most successful audiovisual recording project in the festival’s history, in which 31 productions were recorded and one production was broadcast every day in August 2020 – a beacon of hope for the arts in the first summer of the coronavirus pandemic.
Florian Wiegand studied Cultural Management in Potsdam and Leicester (UK) as well as at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (USA) on a Fulbright Scholarship. As a student, he gained his first professional experience at the Berlin Festwochen, the Salzburg Easter Festival under Claudio Abbado and with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons. From 2001, Florian Wiegand worked at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, which opened in 2002 and was soon internationally celebrated. As executive assistant to the Artistic and Managing director, he established a choir academy, built up the marketing department and was involved in the development of sponsorship and fundraising projects. From 2005, he was head of artistic administration and artistic planning. The special projects he initiated include the »Junge Wilde« series, which promotes young artists, as well as multi-year artist residencies and the »Zeitinseln« festival format.
Beside his work for the Munich Philharmonic as Executive Director, Florian Wiegand is a jury member of the Salzburg Festival’s Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award and regularly lectures in the Executive Master in Arts Administration (EMAA) course at the University of Zurich since 2019.
Florian Wiegand is married with two children.
