Mensch, Musik! #4 Wanderer or: My heart is on fire. A symphonic-literary collage

The composer and conductor David Robert Coleman was born in London into a German-English family. He studied piano, conducting (with Christopher Adey) and composition (with George Benjamin) at the Royal College of Music London, where he won several conducting prizes. He also studied musicology at King’s College Cambridge and wrote a dissertation on Alban Berg’s ‘Altenberg Lieder’.

Compositions of David Robert Coleman have been commissioned and performed by international orchestras and ensembles, such as the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Members of the Berlin Staatskapelle and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2012 he wrote a new instrumentation of the third act of Berg’s ‘Lulu’ for the Berlin State Opera (Barenboim and Andrea Breth. His chamber opera ‘Hans im Glück’ was performed over fifty times at the Berlin State Oper in the Schiller Theater. In 2018 his piece ‘looking for Palestine’ for soprano and orchestra was premiered by Elsa Dreisig, Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the London Proms and Salzburg festival. His opera ‘The House of Dr Hoffmann’, to a libretto by Irene Dische, was premiered at the Brandenburg Opera in 2019. In 2021 his new piano concerto, written for Saleem Ashkar, was played on a tour with the Kammerakademie Potsdam under his direction.

His music is published by Editions Leduc Paris and Ries und Erler Berlin.

Coleman has been invited as a guest-conductor by orchestras such as the LPO London, Saarbrücken State Orchestra (first performance Penderecki’s piano concerto), Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra (first performance of ‘Nein’ by Uri Caine) , Frankfurt Radio Orchestra and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie.

At the Berlin State Opera, Coleman  conducted two premieres of operas by Sciarrino (‘Macbeth’ and ‘Luca mie traditrici’) directed by Jürgen Flimm. He also conducted performances of operas such as Stravinsky’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’, Bernstein’s ‘Candide’, ‘Neither’ by Morton Feldman and ‘Matsukaze’ by Toshio Hosokawa with Barbara Hannigan in the main role.  Coleman has also conducted ‘Matsukaze’ for Japanese television in Tokyo’s New National Theatre and at the Opera de Lille.

Currently he is based in Germany.

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.

Belgian soprano Katrien Baerts has been noted for her powerful and sensual voice as well as for her profound and heartfelt interpretation.

Ms. Baerts made her debut at the National Opera in Amsterdam in a new production of ‘Lulu’, and made her first appearance in Tokyo with ‘House of the Sleeping Beauties’ by Kris Defoort. She performed several world premières at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, as Clara in Loevendie’s opera ‘The Rise of Spinoza’ and as the title role in Zuidam’s ‘Suster Bertken’.

Her concert repertoire includes music from Bach, Mozart and Brahms to Vivier and Ligeti, with orchestras such as the WDR Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Last season Ms. Baerts’ debut was at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and the Konzerthaus Dortmund with The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin

Ms. Baerts has worked with conductors as Richard Egarr, Vladimir Jurowski, Oliver Knussen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Emilio Pomárico and Bas Wiegers. Her debut at the Barbican Center in London as well as her Berg-Zemlinsky album with Het Collectief were enthusiastically received by the press.

Future engagements include a leading role in the Olga Neuwirth – „Bählamms Fest“  as Theodora in the Ruhrtriennale, 2021, concerts with the Residentie Orchestra ( Mozart), with the Orchestra of Antwerp ( A. Berg), Rundfunk Orcherster Berlin ( Cl. Vivier), various concerts with het Collectief, KLangforum,  Asko/Schoenberg etc.

The baritone Dietrich Henschel is known as a regular guest at major opera houses, as a valued interpreter of song and oratorio, as the inventor and protagonist of a wide range of multimedia projects. His repertoire ranges from Monteverdi to the avant-garde.

Henschel began his international career with a co-production between Opéra de Lyon and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris in the title role of Busoni’s opera Doktor Faust, for which he won a Grammy Award.

The singer’s leading roles include Rossini’s Figaro, Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Monteverdi’s Ulisse and Orfeo, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Dr. Schön in Lulu, Golaud in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Contemporary opera also has an important part in Henschel’s repertoire; many great composers such as Pèter Éötvös, Detlev Glanert, Manfred Trojahn, Peter Ruzicka or Chaja Czernowin entrusted him with important roles in the premieres of their works.

In orchestral concerts, Henschel regularly works with conductors such as Sylvain Cambreling, Kent Nagano, Riccardo Chailly and Vladimir Jurowski. Recordings with John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Sir Colin Davis document his oratorio work. He has performed scenic versions of Schubert song cycles in La Monnaie, Theater an der Wien, Norske Opera Oslo and the Komische Oper Berlin, among others. In the project IRRSAL – triptych of forbidden love, conceived together with the director Clara Pons, orchestral songs by Hugo Wolf were combined with a feature film shot especially for their live performance; the great success of this project led to the follow-up project Wunderhorn, an international co-production involving 8 partner institutions, including La Monnaie, Bruxelles, BBC Symphony Orchestra London and De Doelen, Rotterdam.

The 2021/22 season includes the world premiere of Francesco Filidei’s The Red Death at the 100th anniversary of the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Britten’s War Requiem with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. At the festival in Montepulciano, Henschel will perform Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Rita alongside the acclaimed soprano Patrizia Ciofi. In autumn 2022 he will make his role debut as Faninal in a production of Der Rosenkavalier at the Théâtre La Monnaie.

Valery Cheplanova, born in 1980 in Kazan, Russia, spent her early childhood in Russia. She came to Germany at the age of eight and lived mainly in Kiel. At 17, she went to Dresden to study dance at the Palucca School. At the Ernst-Busch-Hochschule für Schauspielkunst in Berlin, she took puppetry in 1999 and after three semesters switched to acting, which she completed in 2005.

As a student, she already appeared on stage at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where she was a permanent ensemble member until summer 2009. As a theatre actress she has performed at Schauspiel Frankfurt, Residenztheater München, Berliner Ensembles and Volksbühne Berlin. There she worked with Dimiter Gotschew, Jürgen Gosch, Frank Castorf, Michael Thalheimer, René Pollesch, Andreas Kriegenburg and Ulrich Rasche, among others.

Film viewers know her from productions by Dominik Graf, Andreas Dresen, Christian Schwochow and others.

Valery Cheplanova currently lives and works in Berlin.

The artistic director of the Hamburg Chamber Music Festival and the “Berliner Endeckungen” association is considered an outstanding representative of an entire generation of pianists, and not just since she was awarded the Echo Prize. The pianist Elisaveta Blumina is a multi-talent. As a child, she aspired to a career as a prima ballerina, learned to play the piano in the tradition of the great Heinrich Neuhaus and, at the same time, learned to paint. At the age of 12 she was accepted at the art school of the museum “Eremitage” and studied art history there for five years. Since her childhood, Elisaveta Blumina has associated tones and sounds with colours. When making music, she therefore always has colours in mind, and she experiences tonal harmonies or dissonances (like Scriabin and Messiaen…) as colours….

In the music world, this highly unusual artist is also appreciated as a gifted mediator. She has taught at the Hamburg Academy of Music and Theatre, at the Villa Musica, the Kronberg Academy or the Orchesterzentrum NRW and regularly gives master classes, for example at the Weikersheim Academy, Tel Aviv Univercity, Jerusalem Academy, the St. Petersburg Conservatory, in Cyprus, the School of Music in Cork or at the Tzfat Music Festival in Israel.

In the meantime, 35 CD’s have consolidated her reputation as an exceptional interpreter of the music of the 20th and 21st centuries as well. Her internationally acclaimed recordings of works by composers such as Nikolai Kapustin, Fazil Say, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovitch, Sofia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvolskaya, Eric Sweeney, Giya Kancheli, Valentin Silvestrov, Grigori Frid and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, whose rediscovery Elisaveta Blumina has tirelessly championed, are proof of this. The labels “cpo” and “Capriccio” are currently producing a series of CDs with all of Weinberg’s piano works and also some chamber music works.

Elisaveta Blumina is a welcome guest at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Elbphilharmonie and the Hamburg Laeiszhalle, the Berlin Philharmonie, Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, St. Petersburg Philharmonie, Gasteig in Munich, Konzerthaus Berlin, Beethovenhalle Bonn, National Concert Hall Dublin as well as at festivals such as Verbier, Colmar, Lockenhaus or the Schleswig-Holstein Festival.

She regularly plays with many well-known orchestras, including the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, St.Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, Staatskapelle Halle, RTE Orchestra in Dublin as well as the Moscow Virtuosi, under conductors such as Vladimir Jurowski, Yuri Temirkanov, Oliver Weder, Gabriel Bebeselea, Vladimir Spivakov or Thomas Sanderling. In 2022 she received an invitation from Chemnitz to conduct a project with the Robert Schumann Philharmonic Orchestra, which will soon be released on CD. When Elisaveta Blumina began painting a few years ago, it was initially a different form of music-making for her. While Blumina’s paintings were considered an insider tip in the beginning, they have since found their way to Nice, Boston, Hamburg, St. Petersburg, Cologne, Tel Aviv and Berlin. Solo exhibitions are held regularly. Music labels that (like Naxos) are also fascinated by Elisaveta Blumina’s painting like to use her paintings as covers for CD productions.