BIography

John Warner received the Mahler Foundation's inaugural Mahler Award at Het Concertgebouw's Mahler Festival in Amsterdam in 2025. Recent conducting highlights include debuts with the Athens State Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and the Franz Schubert Filharmonia, and a return to the Berliner Symphoniker at the Berliner Philharmonie and Konzerthaus. He has appeared with the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Slovak State Philharmonic, Armenian Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic, collaborating with artists including Thomas Hampson, Susan Bullock, James Ehnes, Wu Wei and Roman Simovic.

In opera, Warner has conducted productions including Der fliegende Holländer, La traviata, Die Zauberflöte, Hänsel und Gretel, Tosca, Dido and Aeneas, Die Fledermaus and The Atlantis Code (Frank Schwemmer, world premiere), with engagements at Glyndebourne, Palau de les Arts Valencia and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. He has championed underperformed works by women composers, leading productions of operas by Ethel Smyth and Amy Beach.

He has been invited to lead world premieres at the Philharmonie Luxembourg and Het Concertgebouw, and directed a residency at the Beijing Music Festival featuring several new commissions alongside Chinese premieres of works by Sir George Benjamin, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Huang Ruo and Messiaen.

Warner founded Orchestra for the Earth in 2018 to pair high-level performance with practical climate and biodiversity engagement, bringing music and nature together in concerts, education and touring projects developed with environmental partners.

He has worked closely with conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Karina Canellakis, Robin Ticciati and Edward Gardner, with orchestras and opera houses including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Budapest Festival Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Wiener Symphoniker, Les Siècles and Glyndebourne.

Warner studied music at the University of Oxford (First Class Honours, 2016; MSt with Distinction, 2017) and won 1st Prize in the Oxford Conducting Competition in 2015. He is a guest lecturer at the Curtis Institute of Music and Johns Hopkins University. His chapter on Mahler's interpretation of Tristan und Isolde and his broader approach to editing other composers' works is forthcoming in a Routledge volume in 2026; he also writes for The Wagner Journal.