Maximilian Otto, born in Chemnitz in 1998, has been second Kapellmeister at the Theater Chemnitz since the 2023/24 season and has already conducted revivals of Fledermaus, Offenbachs‘ Orpheus in der Unterwelt, My fair Lady and Carabet as well as performances by Martinů's Die Drei Wünsche.

He began his musical education at the Sächsisches Landesgymnasium für Musik on piano, double bass and composition. Afterwards he completed a bachelor's degree in orchestral conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden with Prof. Ekkehard Klemm and Prof. Steffen Leißner and a master's degree at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar with Prof. Nicolás Pasquet and Prof. Ekhart Wycik.

Maximilian Otto is a prizewinner of the 11th conducting competition of the central German music academies, in which he conducted his own world premiere with the MDR Symphony Orchestra in the prizewinners' concert. He has also been a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) since 2019. He attended master classes with Jean-Philippe Wurtz, Omer-Meir Wellber, Johannes Pell, Ole Kristian Ruud and Christian Thielemann, who invited him to a sponsorship rehearsal designed as a master class at the Salzburg Festival in 2022, in which he conducted the Staatskapelle Dresden. He has also worked with orchestras such as the Robert Schumann Philharmonic Chemnitz, the Sinfonietta Dresden, the Anhaltische Philharmonie Dessau, the Jena Philharmonic, the Elbland Philharmonie Sachsen and the Bad Reichenhall Philharmonic. He has already worked as a musical assistant and/or répétiteur for certain productions at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar (Strauss' "Ariadne"), at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin (children's opera production of Wagner's "Lohengrin"), at the Gaechinger Cantorey (Haydn's "Creation" ) and at the Landesbühnen Sachsen (Marschner's “Vampyr”).

Maximilian Otto's compositional work has received several awards. For example, he received an award at the student composition competition of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011, ten federal prizes at the federal competition "Youth composes" and the Bialas Promotional Prize of the GEMA Foundation in 2018. In 2019 his orchestration of Contrapunctus I from J. S. Bach's "The Art of Fugue" was premiered in the Thomaskirche Leipzig by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under the direction of Omer Meir Wellber. Another performance of this work was planned for 2020 in the 9th symphony concert of the Staatskapelle Dresden, which was canceled due to the corona pandemic. In September 2021 he received an artist scholarship at Schloss Wiepersdorf.

His pianistic successes include several first prizes at the Görlitz/Zgorcelec International Piano Competition in the solo piano and chamber music categories. At the same competition he also received special prizes, for example for the best interpretation of a modern work in 2014. In the summer of 2016 he was invited to the International Spivakov Festival in Moscow with his duo partner on the cello to participate in concerts, for example in the Bolshoi Theater. Maximilian Otto has already played several (piano) concertos as a soloist, including Beethoven's Triple Concerto, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Mozart's C minor Concerto. He performed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Lviv Philharmonic in Ukraine in 2017. In the same year he made his debut with his own piano concerto at the "Hochschule für Musik Dresden", which was performed six more times in 2019 with him at the piano and the Elbland Philharmonie Sachsen in a symphony concert series.