Helmut Koch (musician)

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Helmut Koch (born April 5, 1908 in Barmen , † January 26, 1975 in Berlin ) was a German conductor and choirmaster .

Musical way

Since buying a piano was unaffordable for parents, Helmut Koch learned to play the violin at the age of twelve. At the age of sixteen the family moved to Essen . Violin lessons were continued and Helmut Koch also took lessons in music theory and composition after he had left the secondary school. He began studying at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne and stayed there until the “ Folkwangschule ” in Essen was founded . Although he had a conducting career in mind, he complied with his parents' wish to concentrate initially on seminar training and to pass the state private music teacher examination.

In 1928 he met Hermann Scherchen as a participant in a conducting course . He suggested that he take part in a four-week music festival in Winterthur (Switzerland) as a violinist and violist in order to expand his knowledge of orchestral playing.

During this time, Scherchen decided to continue training Helmut Koch as a private student, he also helped him to work as a sound engineer and assistant with conducting duties at what was then Ostmarken-Rundfunk in Königsberg .

In 1931, on the advice of Scherchen, Koch moved to Berlin, where he took over the direction of one of the largest workers' choirs, the Berliner Schubertchor. In Berlin, Helmut Koch became known as a conductor of workers' choirs.

As the political pressure exerted by the National Socialists on the programming of the program increased, he withdrew from his previous area of ​​activity and took up a position as recording manager for the record companies "Kristall" and " Odeon ". Koch was a member of the NSDAP .

As part of his professional activity he worked with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam . The repertoire of radio recordings and recordings essentially comprised works from the classical heritage.

Immediately after the war, Koch founded various professional and amateur choirs. In 1945, at the request of the Berlin Broadcasting Corporation, he united the 26 most qualified singers from various professional choirs under the name " Solistenvereinigung des Berliner Rundfunks " to form a permanent professional choir.

In his work for the Berliner Rundfunk he founded the “Soloist Association” and the “Great Choir of the Berlin Radio” and the Berlin Chamber Orchestra .

Helmut Koch advocated close collaboration between professional and amateur artists and founded the Berlin Singakademie in 1963 after the Berlin Wall was built, based on the model of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which still existed in the western part of the city .

Helmut Koch also earned merit as an interpreter of important instrumental works: the French record industry awarded him twice the Grand Prix du Disque for his interpretations of L'Orfeo von Monteverdi and the “Folk songs and madrigals of the 17th and 18th centuries” .

In terms of instrumental interpretations, the repertoire ranged from Bach , Handel , Mozart and Mendelssohn to contemporary work. He particularly promoted the works of composers such as Hanns Eisler , Fritz Geißler , Ernst Hermann Meyer and Ruth Zechlin . Finally, Helmut Koch should also be mentioned as an interpreter of Handel's operatic works (including Julius Caesar and Ezio at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin ).

Koch was a candidate from 1950 and from 1954 a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).

honors and awards

Koch was awarded the GDR National Prize for Art and Literature twice, in 1949 he received the III Prize. Class and in 1959 the second class prize. In 1951 Koch was appointed professor at the German University of Music in Berlin . In 1959 he was awarded the Handel Prize of the Halle district . In 1963 he was appointed general music director and also director of the Berlin Singakademie. In 1965 he was elected full member of the Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic . In 1968 he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver and in 1973 in gold.

Music conception

For Helmut Koch, music - old and new - was a human-changing medium that composers and performers should use responsibly. He would have rejected as absurd a division of his artistic tasks into a kind of "preservation of value" in old music and "innovation" in contemporary music:

“ Because I've never met a person,” he once said, “who was so schizophrenic that he felt like a museum on the one hand and modern on the other. Everything we do, we do for the people who live now, who think and feel as today. "

His philosophical standpoint was shaped by the “now, here and today”. He saw a close connection between cultivating contemporary music and classical music.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.discogs.com/de/artist/624749-Helmut-Koch/images
  2. ↑ Harry Waibel : Servants of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 , pp. 172-173.
  3. ↑ Homepage of the Berliner Singakademie ( Memento of the original from June 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berliner-singakademie.de
  4. ↑ Neues Deutschland , April 19, 1968, p. 2
  5. ^ New Germany, October 6, 1973, p. 3
  6. ↑ quoted from the homepage of the Berliner Singakademie ( memento of the original from June 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berliner-singakademie.de
personal data
SURNAME Koch, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German conductor and choir director
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Barmen
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1975
Place of death Berlin