Mensch, Musik! #7 – Cities Land (in) Oceans

The young, Berlin-based American conductor Roderick Cox, winner of the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award 2018, has made his debut with a number of renowned orchestras in recent years, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle and New World Symphony Orchestras, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic. As a guest conductor he has repeatedly led orchestras in Malmö, Kristiansand, Lahti, Washington, Bremen, Dresden, London, Paris, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Detroit, Minnesota and at the Aspen Music Festival.

As an opera conductor, Roderick Cox has led productions at Houston Grand Opera (“Pêcheurs de Perles”) and San Francisco Opera (“Il barbiere di Siviglia”) and recorded Jeanine Tesori’s “Blue” at Washington National Opera. In 2022/2023 he returns to the Opéra national de Montpellier for “Rigoletto”, having previously impressed there with a symphony concert.

Roderick Cox has a sustained commitment to education, diversity and inclusion in the arts. In 2018, he launched the Roderick Cox Music Initiative (RCMI) – a project that provides scholarships to young musicians of colour from underrepresented backgrounds, enabling them to participate in instruments, music lessons and summer camps. Roderick and his new initiative are the subject of the documentary Conducting Life.

Born in Macon, Georgia, Roderick Cox attended the Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University and later studied at Northwestern University, where he earned a master’s degree in 2011. He was awarded the Robert J. Harth Conducting Prize by the Aspen Music Festival in 2013 and has been a fellow of the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Chautauqua Music Festival. In 2016, Roderick Cox was appointed by Osmo Vänskä as Associate Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra for three seasons, having previously served as Assistant Conductor for one year.

With her outstanding technique, delicate touch and penetrating understanding of music, Yu Kosuge is one of the most highly regarded pianists of her generation worldwide. Yu has been giving concerts and performing with orchestras since childhood; at the age of nine, she made her debut with the Tokyo New City Orchestra. In 1993 she moved to Europe to continue her studies in Hanover and Salzburg, receiving great support and inspiration from András Schiff.

Yu Kosuge has performed at leading venues in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Zurich, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Washington and New York. Her debut recital at Carnegie Hall was well received by critics who praised her “acute poetic sensibility…. wit, drama and radiant lyricism”. She has been invited to festivals throughout Europe, including the Salzburg Festival, Rheingau, Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Passau, Braunschweig, Mozartwoche Salzburg, Holland Music Festival, Piano Festival Lille, La Roque d’Anthéron Piano Festival and La Folle Journée de Nantes. She also enjoys chamber music and has performed with members of the Berlin Philharmonic.

In addition to regular appearances with all the major Japanese orchestras, Yu Kosuge has worked with many of Europe’s leading orchestras, including the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the hr-Sinfonieorchester, the Camerata Salzburg, the St. St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and has performed under conductors such as Seiji Ozawa, Jun Märkl, Philippe Herreweghe, Gerd Albrecht, Lawrence Foster, Sakari Oramo, Christian Arming, Yutaka Sado, Mark Wigglesworth, Kazuki Yamada, Osmo Vänskä, Vasili Petrenko and Dennis Russell Davies.

Her numerous CDs for Sony include Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Mito Chamber Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa, Liszt’s 12 Études d’exécution transcendante, Chopin’s Préludes and Nocturne, and Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. Since autumn 2018, Orchid Classics has released recordings of her cycle ‘Four Elements’ on four CDs: ‘Water’, ‘Fire’, ‘Wind’ and “Earth”. In May 2022, Sony released Dai Fujikura’s Piano Concerto No. 3 ‘Impulse’ and Ravel’s Piano Concerto with BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth.

In March 2017, Yu Kosuge received the Suntory Music Award, which is given to individuals or organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to the development of Western music in Japan.

Yu Kosuge lives in Berlin.

Natalie Katharina Ilona Szende studied Musicology and Cultural Anthropology at the
Humboldt University Berlin. During her studies, she worked as a curatorial assistant for the
interdisciplinary project Montag Modus at the intersection of performing and visual arts, due
to which her interest in contemporary performance art intensified. In her hometowns,
Budapest and Augsburg, she has been active in music and acting from an early age – in the
latest production of the Berlin-based ensemble Shakespeare Reloaded she played the role of
Romeo. The production was invited to The Dell in Stratford-upon-Avon by the Royal
Shakespeare Company in August 2022.
Since September, she has been pursuing an Electronic Composition program at the Catalyst
Institute for Arts and Technology and participates in the collaborative initiative Hyper:Synth
with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester. On the common ground between classical and
electronic music, whose principles and possibilities the artist explores, Szende debuted with
her electroacoustic compositions in November 2022 as part of the Vocantare Chamber Choir’s
concerts conducted by Tobias Walenciak. She made her solo debut at this year’s CTM-Vorspiel
with the performative composition Cave Waltzes for piano, voice and live-electronics.
Natalie’s compositional approach is to create a synthesis between sonic, (inter)human and
spatial elements, also by fusing the acoustic and electronic spectrum, manifesting in cinematic
Dreamscapes.

Eliad Wagner (b. 1979) is a composer, performer, sound artist and lecturer, a classically trained musician, holding academic degrees in physics and music. His musical activities explore the meeting point of composition and performance while addressing thoughts on the vocabulary of electronic music, autonomous processes, intention and attention in audio culture, and people’s natural relationship with technology.

In 2012 Wagner relocated to Berlin, where he quickly became an active member of the city’s experimental music scene as a performer of live electronic music (playing the modular synthesizer). as well as composing for small ensembles and installations. He is co-founder of and regularly contributing composer to the electro-acoustic ensemble ‘Circuit Training’. As a performer he worked with artist such as Ignaz Schick, Marta Zapparoli, Wolfgang Seidel, Alexi Borisov, Tristan Honsinger, Olaf Rupp, Els Vandeweyer, Emilio Gordoa, Andre Vida, Richard Scott, Alexandre Babel, Tomomi Adachi, Dean Roberts, Andrea Parkins and Robyn Schulkowsky.

Since 2015, He is the head of the Electronic Music Production and Performance degree programme at the Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts and Technology in Berlin- an international, diverse, genre-agnostic academic programme he has designed to train students in composition and performance of electronic music.

Svenja Liesau was born in Magdeburg in 1989 and completed her acting training at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin in 2013. Even before her studies, she had her first engagements at the Magdeburg Theatre, where she worked with Jan Jochymski, among others. Since February 2013 she has been part of the ensemble of the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin. She has worked with directors Armin Petras and Jan Bosse, among others. From 2013 to 2017 she was an ensemble member at Schauspiel Stuttgart. From 2017 to 2022, Svenja Liesau was again a permanent ensemble member at the Gorki. There she worked with the directors Yael Ronen, Sebastian Nübling, Christian Weise and Leonie Böhm, among others. She played in VERRÜCKTES BLUT directed by Nurkan Erpulat, which was invited to the Theatertreffen in 2011, and in UND SICHER IST MIT MIR DIE WELT VERSCHWUNDEN directed by Sebastian Nübling, which was chosen by Theater heute as play of the year 2021. She can also be seen regularly on stage in HAMLET directed by Christian Weise and as a guest.

Vidina Popov was born in Vienna in 1992. In the noughties, Popov performed as a child at the Vienna Volkstheater and worked for ORF as a children’s presenter for numerous programmes. From 2012 to 2016 she studied acting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and in 2013 wrote the monologue play Ich bin Bulgare?! which was performed in the Box at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, among other venues. Together with her class, she wins the ensemble prize at the Schauspielschultreffen in 2015.

In 2016 she also attended the clown school École Philippe Gaulier in Paris. Popov has been a permanent member of the ensemble at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre since the 2017/2018 season. She will be invited to the 2022 Theatertreffen with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope.

She has been nominated several times by Theater heute as best young actress for her roles in Alles Schwindel, Und sicher ist mir die Welt verschwunden and Slippery Slope.

Popov is regularly active in film and television, among others in the ARD series Der Lissabon Krimi, in Tatort or most recently in the biopic Alice. She is currently writing another solo with the working title The Pop-Off Show.

Since 2007, tauchgold (Heike Tauch and Florian Goldberg) have been realising pieces at the interface between radio and stage. Their work includes social satires, historical dramas and philosophical themes. However, specially composed music always plays a central role. In 2019, their stage work “The Glassing Sea. A Narratorio for Strings and Voices”, which was created with a composition by Cathy Milliken based on the radio piece “Metamorphosen”, premiered in Munich in 2019. For “Geborgte Landschaft. A Narratorio for Piano Trio and Voices”, the composer Dai Fujikura wrote the music (2022). The English stage version “BORROWED LANDSCAPE” premiered in New York in 2023 and will tour the US from 2024. Since 2022, tauchgold have been realising the RSB series “Mensch, Musik!” as an author-director team.