Biography
Isabel Karajan (born 25 June 1960 in Vienna) is an Austrian actress and the daughter of Herbert von Karajan and Eliette von Karajan.
After finishing her Matura, Isabel Karajan pursued acting studies in Vienna and Paris. Her early acting roles took place at theaters in Zurich and Stuttgart, the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, the Der Kreis theatre in Vienna, and the Théâtre National de la Colline. Between 1995 and 1998, she portrayed the role of Good Works in Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival. Her performances have also been seen in Avignon, Adelaide, Australia, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Schauspielhaus Stuttgart, Münchner Kammerspiele, and Schaubühne Berlin. In 2000, she appeared in Arthur Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher at the Saito-Kinen Festival in Japan.
Isabel Karajan is passionate about extraordinary projects and has been developing her own solo theatrical performances and musical collaborations involving chamber music and large orchestras alongside directors such as Klaus Ortner, Jorge Lavelli, Julian Pölsler, and Christina Pfrötschner. She presented "Miss Death meets Mr. Shostakovich," a scenic collage exploring fear, featuring Shostakovich's chamber music and texts by his contemporaries, at festivals including the Shostakovich Days in Gohrisch, Salzburg Easter Festival, Diaghilev Festival of Currentzis in Perm, Soli Deo Gloria Festival in Goslar, and the Kfar Blum Festival in Israel.
Together with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, she performed in Stravinsky's The Story of the Soldier and Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King. At the Saito-Kinen Festival in Japan, she took part in Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher. In 2015, under Julian Pölsler's direction, she appeared in Die Feuerprobe, combining poems by Christine Lavant with Shostakovich's Op. 40. Additionally, in collaboration with director Christina Pfrötschner, she created a word music collage for A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In 2016, Isabel Karajan starred in Bernstein's Candide with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jeffrey Tate. The following year, she performed Edgar A. Poe's The Mask of the Red Death at the Swiss Alp Classic Festival in Andermatt alongside Clemens Hellsberg and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. In the summer of 2018, she collaborated with composer Beat Furrer at the Salzburg Festival, interpreting the "Wüstenbuch" fragment by Ingeborg Bachmann. She was the lead actress in the development and premiere of the opera Stillhang by Christian Spitzenstätter in December 2018, directed by Klaus Ortner. In 2019, she portrayed a violist's perspective in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as arranged by F. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, performing with the Staatskapelle Dresden and conductor Vladimir Jurowski during three concert evenings at the Semper Oper Dresden.
