Thomas Hengelbrock

Thomas Hengelbrock (born 9 June 1958 in Wilhelmshaven) is a German violinist, musicologist, stage director and conductor. He is the founder and director of the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor and the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble. Since 2011, he has been the principal conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra.

Career

Thomas Hengelbrock studied the violin with Rainer Kussmaul and started his career in Würzburg and Freiburg im Breisgau. He worked as an assistant to Witold Lutosławski, Mauricio Kagel and Antal Doráti and played with ensembles such as Concentus Musicus Wien under Nikolaus Harnoncourt. In 1985 he cofounded the Freiburger Barockorchester where he worked as a violinist and a conductor.

Thomas Hengelbrock founded in Freiburg the choir Balthasar-Neumann-Chor in 1991 and in 1995 the orchestra Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble to perform works from Baroque to contemporary music in Historically informed performances, such as Verdi's operas Rigoletto and Falstaff at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden in 2004 and 2007.

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Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms (German: [joˈhanəs ˈbʁaːms]; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs", a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Brahms composed for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, and for voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.

Brahms is often considered both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Baroque and Classical masters. He was a master of counterpoint, the complex and highly disciplined art for which Johann Sebastian Bach is famous, and of development, a compositional ethos pioneered by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and other composers. Brahms aimed to honour the "purity" of these venerable "German" structures and advance them into a Romantic idiom, in the process creating bold new approaches to harmony and melody. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.