Klaus Simon (musician)

Klaus Simon (born April 19, 1968 in Überlingen am Bodensee ) is a German pianist, conductor, arranger and editor.

Life

born in Überlingen on Lake Constance. Studied music, German and geography in Freiburg. Piano with Michael Leuschner, master classes with Aloys Kontarsky (piano) and Hans Zender and Johannes Kalitzke (conducting). Founder and artistic director of the Holst-Sinfonietta and the Opera Factory Freiburg (until 2014: Young Opera Company). With both formations, he is primarily dedicated to the music of the 20th century, without seeing himself as a new music specialist. Striving for stylistic variability and the stringent logic of the internal dramaturgy of the programs mark an ambitious artistic profile of both formations.

The versatility as a conductor, pianist and arranger are testimony to a versatile artistic personality who does not want to be confined to a template. His repertoire as a conductor and pianist ranges from Mozart to Widmann. The focus is on classical modernism (music between 1900 and 1950, especially composers of the Second Vienna School and EW Korngold), minimal music and a preference for British and American music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Since 1999 he has been able to make various CD and radio recordings (ArsMusici / Naxos / cpo / Spektral / bastille musique and DRS2 / SWR2 / BR4 / HR2 / NDR2 / DLF Kultur) as a conductor and accompanist. A successful collaboration on recording projects has existed with the Naxos label since 2003. With the CD recording of EW Korngold's last stage work The Stumme Serenade in April 2009 he made his debut with cpo.

Together with the SWR as co-producer, he recorded Claude Vivier's only opera Kopernikus as a conductor in a studio production in 2012, which was published by bastille musique in 2016. The stage performances were a triumph for both the press and the public.

This recording won the German Record Critics' Prize in 2016 and also won the International Classical Music Award (ICMA) in the opera category in 2017.

In the summer of 2018 the first CD recording of Luke Bedford's chamber opera Through his Teeth, which he recorded with the Opera Factory and the Holst-Sinfonietta, received nominations in two categories for the German Record Award and was also featured in the magazine Crescendo as a "CD der Week "and at the same time also as" CD of the month "in the magazine Die Deutsche Bühne .

As a pianist, he focused on the song and has now given concerts in the most renowned concert halls in Germany, such as the Konzerthaus Berlin or the Laeiszhalle Hamburg. His repertoire now includes more than 1000 songs and songs from art songs to Broadway songs. The core repertoire of his work as a song accompanist is German late romanticism, whereby he has devoted himself particularly intensively to the songs of Hans Pfitzner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold: for the Naxos label, he recorded a complete edition of all songs by these two composers with well-known singers. At the invitation of the 2nd Hamburg Music Festival, he was hired in April 2016 to accompany the award-winning baritone Hans Christoph Begemann for the world premiere of the Morgensternlieder and the cycle “1917” by Erwin Schulhoff. In September 2018 he also accompanied the Czech premiere of all Schulhoff's baritone songs in his native Prague.

As a large-scale recording project, the first complete recording of all 89 songs by Erwin Schulhoff was made between 2016 and 2018 with Sunhae Im and Britta Stallmeister-soprano, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner-mezzo-soprano and Hans Christoph Begemann-baritone together with the SWR. He himself published the sheet music for it, which was published by Schott Music in three volumes in 2017.

Since 2007 he has also worked as an arranger for Universal Edition / Vienna and Schott Music / Mainz. His arrangements of Mahler's 1st, 4th, 5th and 9th symphonies, Mahler's Wunderhornlieder and Schönberg's orchestral songs op. 8, Alban Berg's clarinet pieces op. 5 and his fragmentary Passacaglia, Ravel's opera L'Heure espagnole and much more are highly valued. They have now been performed over 500 times worldwide, including a. from the Bavarian State Orchestra, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Zurich Opera, the Ensemble musikFabrik, the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Concertgebouw Camerata, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra etc.

Conductors such as K. Nagano, G. Dudamel, E. Pomarico, S. Asbury and many others have performed his arrangements.

His arrangement of Mahler's 9th Symphony was recorded on CD almost simultaneously in 2014 by three ensembles in the USA, the Netherlands and Germany.

In 2014 he completed his arrangement of Mahler's 5th Symphony for Chamber Ensemble, which the Holst-Sinfonietta successfully premiered under his direction in November 2014 in Freiburg and which it recorded on CD in January 2015.

Current orders include a. Arrangements and instrumentations of Gustav Mahler's 6th Symphony (premier March 2019) as well as Alban Berg's Lieder op.2 for the Musikkollegium Winterthur and Gustav Mahler's 7th Symphony for the Alma Mahler Chamber Orchestra (premier summer 2019).

Web links

• Website of the Holst-Sinfonietta
• Website of the Opera Factory Freiburg

Individual evidence