Musicians Archive - Page 31 of 89

Press Enter to search

Cyrille Nanchen began his singing training at the Schola de Sion, first as a soprano and then as a baritone, before joining several vocal ensembles in his home town.

He also studied piano, singing, theory and choral conducting at the Conservatoires of Sion and Fribourg. In 2018, he obtained his piano certificate in the classes of Cornelia Venetz and Rita Possa.

After studying music for a year at the University of Fribourg, Cyrille Nanchen was accepted as a choral conductor in the classes of Beat Schäfer and Markus Utz at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, where he also studied singing with Roswitha Müller. He also had the opportunity to work with Anders Eby (SE).

Since autumn 2018, he has been assistant director and singer of the Oberwalliser Vokalensemble.

Vasily Petrenko is Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (since 2021), and Chief Conductor of the European Union Youth Orchestra (since 2015). He is Conductor Laureate of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, following his hugely acclaimed fifteen year tenure as their Chief Conductor from 2006-2021, and has also served as Principal Guest Conductor and subsequently Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia (2016-2022), Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra (2013-2020), Principal Conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (2009–2013), and Principal Guest Conductor of St Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theatre, where he began his career as Resident Conductor (1994–1997).

Vasily Petrenko was born in 1976 and started his music education at the St Petersburg Capella Boys Music School – Russia’s oldest music school. He then studied at the St Petersburg Conservatoire where he participated in masterclasses with such luminary figures as Ilya Musin, Mariss Jansons and Yuri Temirkanov.

He has worked with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), St Petersburg Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Czech Philharmonic, NHK Symphony and Sydney Symphony orchestras. He has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, Grafenegg Festival and made frequent appearances at the BBC Proms. Recent years have seen a series of highly successful North American debuts, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and the San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montréal and St Louis Symphony orchestras.

Equally at home in the opera house, and with over thirty operas in his repertoire, Vasily Petrenko made his debuts in 2010 at Glyndebourne Festival Opera (Macbeth) and the Opéra de Paris (Eugene Onegin), and in recent seasons has also conducted at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, Zürich Opera and Bayerische Staatsoper. In the 19/20 season, he also made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York with a production of The Queen of Spades.

Vasily Petrenko has established a strongly defined profile as a recording artist. Amongst a wide discography, his Shostakovich symphony cycle for Naxos Records with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra has garnered worldwide acclaim. With the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, he has recently released cycles of Scriabin’s symphonies and Strauss’ tone poems.

In September 2017, Vasily Petrenko was honoured with the Artist of the Year award at the prestigious annual Gramophone Awards, one decade on from receiving their Young Artist of the Year award in October 2007. In 2010, he won the Male Artist of the Year at the Classical BRIT Awards and is only the second person to have been awarded Honorary Doctorates by both the University of Liverpool and Liverpool Hope University (in 2009), and an Honorary Fellowship of the Liverpool John Moores University (in 2012), awards which recognise the immense impact he has had on the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the city’s cultural scene.

András Keller is the world-renowned violinist and founder of Keller Quartet. In the course of his concert tours, Keller has taken to the stages of nearly all prominent concert halls of the world, such as the Musikverein and the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican in London, the Berliner Philharmonie and Konzerthaus, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York. Since 2007, he has been music director of Concerto Budapest. In addition to dozens of international awards, Keller was a recipient of the Liszt Prize in 1995 as a member of Keller Quartet, in 2012 he was awarded the Bartók-Pásztory Prize and Meritorious Artist Honour, and then in 2021 his work was recognized with the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious state award in the field of Hungarian culture. In 2022 he received the Prima Primissima Prize in Music Art. For the last two decades, Keller has taught at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and has been a regular guest of Yale University’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove. Between 2012 and 2015, he served as the head of the Chamber Music Department at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Since 2016, András Keller has taught at the violin faculty of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, which also appointed him as Béla Bartók International Chair in 2018.

Máté Szűcs is a Hungarian violist. He was born to a musical family and started his education at the age of five, playing the violin. He studied with Ferenc Szecsődi in Szeged, then switched to the viola and worked with Erwin Schiffer. Szűcs attended the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Waterloo, and the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, where he studied with Leo de Neve. In 1998, he was a finalist in the Jean Françaix Competition in Paris, and a laureate in the International Tenuto Competition in Brussels. Szűcs became an orchestral musician, and performed as a solo violist with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and the Royal Flemish Orchestra, eventually becoming the principal violist of the Berlin Philharmonic. Szűcs performs mostly in Europe as a soloist and chamber musician, and has recorded for TYX Art, Profil, and Phaedra.

After beginning his studies in 1957 with Mario Bigazzi and later working with Giuseppe Marchesi, Leo Nucci won several singing competitions in 1965 and 1966. In 1967, he won the A Belli competition at Spoleto after having made his debut as Rossini’s Figaro. In Milan, while singing in the La Scala chorus, Nucci studied the title role in Rigoletto with maestro Ottaviano Bizzarri and, in 1973, won the Concorso Internazionale Viotti di Vercelli. Nucci appeared at La Scala as Rossini’s Figaro in 1976, the first entry on a long list of leading roles he would sing there. At Covent Garden in 1978, he was called upon to substitute for an ailing colleague as Miller in Verdi’s Luisa Miller, a performance that resulted in re-engagement at Renato (Anckarström) in Un Ballo in Maschera. In 1979, Nucci made his debut at the Wiener Staatsoper as Figaro. Renato served as the agent of his debut at the Metropolitan Opera on February 23, 1980, and again for Paris in 1981 and Salzburg in 1989. Since his debut at the Met, Nucci has sung many of the Verdi roles there. In addition, he has appeared in both San Francisco and Chicago. Nucci has frequently appeared at La Scala, participating in several productions surrounding the centenary of Verdi’s death. For a production of La Forza del Destino, he sang after a short recuperation from a serious ailment. His activities in the recording studio have resulted in a half-dozen Grammys for Best Opera Recording. Nucci has recorded all the major Verdi baritone roles, some of them more than once, all with leading conductors; the list includes Abbado, Bartoletti, Chailly, Giulini, Karajan, Levine, Maazel, Mehta, Muti, and Solti.

Vincent Mons began his musical career playing the classical guitar, and went on to study audio recording at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional d’Annecy. Further studies at the École Louis-Lumière in Paris introduced him to the world of film and radio. At the same time, he developed his record and concert recording activities. It was then that he joined the sound team of Kali Son for the Verbier Festival, subsequently handling the audio post-production. A stint in Canada with The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s audio programme confirmed his desire to continue in this direction. On his return to France, he joined the network of independent sound engineers for classical recordings. Since then, he has worked in Europe for a number of labels, both as a recording engineer and producer, adding artistic direction to his work.

Marc Pasteau is Administrator and Associate Founder of Kali Son. While still a student, in 2002, Marc Pasteau founded Kali Son, a company specialising in recording and sound systems. Six years later, Kali Net branch, dedicated to high quality live webcasts, was created, followed shortly by Kali Vision—a live video capture and production solution, offering a complete audiovisual production and broadcasting. In parallel to the administration of the group and his activity as an operator, Marc Pasteau has worked with the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional d’Annecy since 2006 to develop a professional course for ‘sound professionals’ where he teaches recording and post-production to students in science and music. He is also involved in various professional training courses and conferences and is a fixture at the Verbier Festival each summer, where Kali son records all Mainstage concerts.

Golda was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1983. Her mother is a retired nurse, and her father is a retired university professor of Mathematics. Golda studied journalism at Rhodes University before switching to singing at the University of Cape Town, and then at the Juilliard School in New York. In 2011, Golda won a place at the Opera Studio of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, after which her career developed rapidly.

From her base in Germany she has conquered the world’s opera houses and concert halls, from the Vienna State Opera to the Salzburg Festival; and from La Scala, Milan, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, to name but four.

In 2020 Golda appeared at the Last Night of the Proms in London, and the following year the recording of Porgy and Bess, in which she portrayed the role of Clara, received a Grammy Award. In 2022 Golda was described as a “gifted soprano” when she received the Bavarian government’s Special Prize for Culture. She was also named Artiste Étoile by the Lucerne Festival the same year.

Her debut album with the pianist Jonathan Ware was likewise released in 2022: This Be Her Verse is devoted to female composers who until then had been ignored by music historians. Reviewers were enthusiastic: the Munich Merkur described it as “one of the most powerful lieder albums of the recent past”, while the Guardian welcomed it as a further demonstration of Golda’s versatility and musical intelligence. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung spoke of the soprano “singing with so much dramatic talent, such magnificent use of tone, colours, and such a feeling for swing that even Schubert and Schumann would have swallowed hard.” This album demonstrates Golda’s great love of lieder and concert singing, a world in which she is just as much at home as she is in the realm of opera.

Germain Umdenstock is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who currently performs with Nicolas Fraissinet and the group Elynn The Green.

Since 1996 Umdenstock has performed on stages such as Les Trois Baudets (Paris), le Flow (Paris), l’Auguste théâtre (Paris), Metro Al Madina (Beirut), Teatro Nacional Rubén Darío (Managua, Nicaragua), Teatro del Arte (San Salvador, El Salvador), Museo del Jade (San Jose, Costa Rica), Le festival Rockailles (Reignier), Maison du Peuple (Ouagadougou), Salle Métropole, D-Club, Festival de la Cité, Festi’Neuch, Venoge Festival, Casino-théâtre (Geneva), Théâtre du Passage (Neuchâtel), opening for artists including Placebo, Keziah Jones, Michel Bühler, Anthony B, Clarika, Christophe Willem, Julien Clerc and Laurent Garnier.

Umdenstock also composes and arranges music for shows, humanitarian projects, documentary films, dramas and, most recently, a France TV animated series. This production activity began in 2007 when he teamed up with Lausanne-based producer, musician and DJ Ripperton, who introduced him to electronic music. Together they wrote several tracks for his albums, Niwa (2010) and A Little Part Of Shade (2013), as well as several remixes for artists such as Phonique, Jimpster and Ellen Allien. Since then, Germain Umdenstock has set up his own recording studio in Geneva.

Germain Umdenstock holds a Master of Music diploma from the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève (2004) and a music pedagogy diploma from the Société Suisse de Pédagogie Musicale (2006), and teaches guitar at the Conservatoire de Vevey-Montreux Riviera and at Emagina-sons in Grand-Lancy. As part of these two institutions, he set up the Rock Workshops, which he has been running since 2009. The students in these workshops paid tribute to Claude Nobs at the Miles Davis hall in February 2013 and won the Senheiser prize at the 2014 Swiss Youth Music Competition, Pop/Rock section, and have performed every year since 2015 on the Music In The Park stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival.