Mark Mast

Mark Mast (2014)

Mark Mast (* 1963 in Baiersbronn-Mitteltal in the Black Forest ) is a German conductor and artistic director .

Mark Mast is a conductor, artistic director of several festivals and institutions and an educator. He studied music in Heidelberg and later in Paris and Munich. He received important impulses for his career as a conductor from Leonard Bernstein and Sergiu Celibidache .

Importance as a conductor

For years he has worked with the baroque orchestra L'arpa festante in the field of historical performance practice , but is also dedicated to contemporary music. Particularly noteworthy here is the intensive examination of works by composers of the 20th century such as Carl Orff , Werner Egk , Karl Amadeus Hartmann , Sergiu Celibidache and Wilfried Hiller . He has commissioned many works by contemporary composers (including Cecil Effinger , Wolfram Graf , Jörg Riedlbauer , Joseph Schwantner ) and premiered or performed themPremiere .

As a guest he regularly conducts German ensembles (such as the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the Württemberg Philharmonic Reutlingen, the Baden-Baden Philharmonic, the Southwest German Chamber Orchestra Pforzheim, the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn , the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra , Hofer and Munich Symphony Orchestra , the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg and the Philharmonic of Nations) and international orchestras (Camerata Athens in Greece, the Latvian National Orchestra Riga, the Orchestra of the Slovenian National Theater, the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa in Japan). He worked with soloists such as Daniel Müller-Schott , Justus Frantz , August Everding , but also Loriot , Hellmuth Matiasek and Konstantin Wecker . Opera, ballet and film productions e.g. B. in the Munich Prinzregententheater , at the Volkstheater Rostock, at the Slovenian National Theater in Ljubljana and at the State Theater Eisenach testify to his versatility as a conductor. As musical director of the Orff Festival in Andechs , Mark Mast conducted all of the music theater productions there from 1998 to 2009, often staging Die Mond , Die Bernauerin , Die Kluge , Astutuli and the Midsummer Night's Dream by Carl Orff and the Goggolori by Wilfried Hiller.

Since 1998, Mark Mast has been artistic director of the Black Forest Music Festival, which thanks to its concept has developed from small beginnings into a nationally recognized event.

In 2001 he was appointed director of the Sergiu Celibidache Foundation. For them he designed and directed the Sergiu Celibidache Festival for the first time in 2002 , which took place again in Munich in 2004. The 3rd Sergiu Celibidache Festival took place in October 2006 in Iași (Romania).

Mark Mast was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Moldovan State Philharmonic Iasi in early 2006. In 2008, Mark Mast was awarded the Werner Egk Prize of the city of Donauwörth for his versatile and successful work as a conductor and artistic director.

In May 2010 he founded the "Orff Days of the Bavarian Philharmonic" in the Prinzregententheater in Munich and in this context, after the world premiere of the Carmina bavariae by Konstantin Wecker, brought the Carmina burana by Carl Orff and on two evenings in a row that Complete Performances Trionfi ( Carmina Burana - Catulli Carmina - Trionfo di Afrodite) by Carl Orff.

Mark Mast's work is shaped by the understanding of a Kapellmeister who puts his craft at the service of the composer's cause . He also sees the lively dialogue with artists from all disciplines as well as with the public as a central concern of his work. “ If listening and listening makes the language of our soul and heart resound, then silence can become music. "

Mark Mast lives with his family in Munich.

Importance as an educator

As chief conductor and artistic director of the Bavarian Philharmonic , Mast has been intensively educational for many years. Both artistically and educationally, the orchestra is responsible for the children's philharmonic orchestra Munich, the Munich Youth Orchestra, the Young Munich Philharmonic and the Bavarian Philharmonic Choir. He regularly cooperates with members of renowned orchestras such as the Munich Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera and the Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio . In addition to numerous international concert tours to various European countries and the USA, the focus of his work is on orchestral and opera academies as well as symphonic master classes , in which he works with Zubin Mehta , Colin Davis and Esa-Pekka Salonen , for example .

Web links

• Works by and about Mark Mast in the catalog of the German National Library