Category Archives: Taitelijat en

Aleksi Barrière was introduced to theatre as an interdisciplinary art form while working as a performer, a dramaturge and an assistant to director Sarah Méadel, with whom he also co-directed he first show in 2006. Barrière studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne University and Stage Directing and Scenography at the Theatre Academy of Prague. He has collaborated among others with director Peter Sellars as an assistant, and with multimedia groups such as Image Auditive as a director and designer. He currently creates most of his projects within the music theatre company La Chambre aux échos, which he co-founded with Clément Mao-Takacs. In the last season he has also been invited as a stage director in international venues in Chicago, Hamburg and Bergen. Also an author and a scholar, his texts have been commissioned by various institutions and set to music.

Aliisa Neige Barrière was born into a French-Finnish family in Paris where her music studies included violin, piano, chamber music and choral as well as orchestral conducting. In June of 2019, she completed her Master’s Degree in Violin Performance with Peter Herresthal at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she appeared as a soloist in Vivaldi’s Spring and Winter under the direction of Øyvind Bjorå, and from where she also holds a Bachelor’s Degree. Since her move to Oslo in 2016, Barrière has been been very active in Norway, where she was a founding member of two ensembles; Ensemble Temporum and Ensemble +47, mainly dedicated to new music, and since 2018 is the violinist of ÄÄNI-kollektiivi, based in Helsinki. In 2019, Barrière started her own festival in Oslo with co-artistic director Janne Valkeajoki: Nordlyd, a meeting-place between audiences and performers, for music ranging from baroque to contemporary and experimentation with concert form, especially curated for one of Oslo’s central venues, Kulturhuset. Earlier studies include violin studies with Renee Jolles, as well as orchestral conducting and chamber music, at the Preparatory Division of Mannes College of Music (2011-12), and as the winner of the Concerto Competition, she played the first movement of the Khachaturian Concerto at Symphony Space, New York. Also in 2012, Barrière received her Prix de Perfectionnement in Paris, at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional, her teachers being Suzanne Gessner (violin) and Judy Chin (piano). In 2013 Barrière was awarded a full scholarship for four years of studies at Mannes College of Music, and she returned to New York to start her Bachelor’s Degree with Lewis Kaplan and Laurie Smukler (violin), Michael Adelson and David Hayes (conducting) and was part of the Mannes Baroque Players. Barrière’s diverse interests have led her to be invited to play in ensembles such as Barokksolistene, Ensemble Intercontemporain, or the Parisian Secession Orchestra. As of 2018, she also resumed her conducting studies and attended masterclasses with Atso Almila and Luke Dollman, and is currently studying under Jorma Panula at the Panula Academy.

John Butcher is well known as a saxophonist who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of time and place. His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and unusual acoustics. Since the early 80s, he has collaborated with hundreds of musicians – including Derek Bailey, John Stevens’ SME, Rhodri Davies, Andy Moor (EX), Phil Minton, Christian Marclay, AMM, Gino Robair, Polwechsel, Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury, and Okkyung Lee. Alongside long term projects he values occasional encounters; from large groups such as the EX Orkestra & Butch Morris’ “London Skyscraper”, to duo concerts with Fred Frith, Akio Suzuki, Paal Nilssen-Love, Keiji Haino, David Toop, Otomo Yoshihide, Sophie Agnel and Matthew Shipp. Recent compositions include “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, two HCMF commissions for his own groups, “Good Liquor …” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts”, a response to recordings of early Arabic classical music, which was shortlisted for a 2014 British Composer’s Award. The well-received “Resonant Spaces” CD is a collection of solo site-specific performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.

The Paris-based company La Chambre aux échos is a collective centered on interdisciplinary collaborations, that explores the entire range of the interactions between music and theatre, from staged concerts to music theatre and opera, immersive performances, installations and educational projects. La Chambre aux échos works mainly with recent and new music, and hence living composers. Recently these have included Kaija Saariaho, who’s La Passion de Simone’s chamber version they premiered and toured internationally, and Juha T. Koskinen, with whom they created the performance Violences for the Finnish National Opera. La Chambre aux échos is the only French collective led conjointly by a stage director (Aleksi Barrière) and a conductor (Clément Mao-Takacs).

Rhodri Davies was born in 1971 and lives in Swansea. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations. He has released four solo albums: Trem, Over Shadows, Wound Response and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, a duo with John Butcher, The Sealed Knot, Common Objects and a trio with John Tilbury and Michael Duch. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Mark Fell, Kahimi Karie, Laura Cannell, Lina Lapelyte, Sachiko M, Bill Orcutt, Jim O’Rourke, Christian Marclay and David Toop. In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. New pieces for solo harp have been composed for him by: Eliane Radigue, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, since 2016 he is a Chapter Associate Artist and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.

Formed only as recently as in 2009, defunensemble has astonishingly fast established itself as one of the most important contemporary music groups in Finland. The ensemble’s vigorous mission is to systematically delve into the world of electroacoustic music. Defunensemble gives Finnish premieres of the most essential electroacoustic repertoire both classic and current, while simultaneously actively commissioning new works incorporating the latest technologies. With artistic director Sami Klemola the ensemble’s concert concepts have proven to be highly innovative, blending different sub-genres of the electroacoustic persuasion with an unprecedented street credibility—any dusty notions of classical music are soon forgotten. A serious professional undertaking, the musicians and sound designers of defunensemble are some of the most active personalities in the Finnish contemporary music scene. After conquering the major Finnish festivals, the ensemble is already gaining international pull, their concert calendar is filling rapidly.

– Jarkko Hartikainen

During its brief history defunensemble has already performed over 90 concerts and at over 20 different festivals, the most notable being Tampere biennale (FI), Time of Music (FI), Musica nova Helsinki (FI), Helsinki Festival (FI), Flow Festival (FI), Klang Concert Series (FI), Crusell Music Festival (FI), Nordic Music Days (FI, SE), dOCUMENTA (DE), chiffren – kieler tage für neue musik (DE), November Music (NL), Loop Festival (BE), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (GB), Re:new music (DK) and Copenhagen Avantgarde Music Festival Klang (DK). Defunensemble has premiered works by – for example – Tim Page, Antti Auvinen, Hikari Kiyama, Ville Raasakka, Perttu Haapanen, Pink Twins, M. A. Numminen, Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, Peter Ablinger, Christian Winther Christensen and Gilbert Nouno.

Peter Herresthal is recognised as a brilliant and inspired interpreter of contemporary violin music, strongly associated both in concert and recordings with concertos by composers including Per Nørgård, Arne Nordheim, Ørjan Matre, Henri Dutilleux, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Olav Anton Thommessen, Henrik Hellstenius and Jon Øivind Ness. He has appeared with leading orchestras and ensembles worldwide, including most recently the BBC Philharmonic, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, the Arctic Philharmonic Sinfonietta, Oslo Philharmonic and Stavanger Symphony Orchestras, with conductors including Andrew Manze, Thomas Adès, Martyn Brabbins, Anu Tali and Sakari Oramo. Peter Herresthal has given the Austrian, Norwegian, Spanish and Australian premieres of the Thomas Adès violin concerto ‘Concentric Paths’, the latter conducted by the composer at the Melbourne Festival. He has recorded a number of CDs for BIS and Simax/Aurora including prize-winning discs of Nordheim and Ness, and most recently the Buene and Wallin concerti nominated for Norwegian Grammys. His Nørgård recording was nominated for a Gramophone Award and was Editors Choice in The Strad and International Record Review. He has performed Kaija Saariaho’s Graal Theater with the London Sinfonietta in Bergen, Nantes and London, and most recently recorded the work with the Oslo Philharmonic. Peter Herresthal is a Professor at the Oslo Academy and visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music, London. He performs on a GB Guadagnini from Milan 1753.

Flutist Camilla Hoitenga is at home on stages all over the world, performing in venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Royal Festival Hall in London, the Kremlin in Moscow and the Forbidden City in Beijing, China. She is especially well known for her collaborations with composers like Kaija Saariaho and Karlheinz Stockhausen. She has premiered concertos written for her by composers such as Kaija Saariaho, Péter Köszeghy, Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi and Raminta Serksnyte with orchestras such as the London Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Royal Philharmonic of Stockholm, the Finnish Radio Orchestra, as well as with orchestras in Paris, Barcelona, Helsinki, Berlin, Kyoto, Tampere, Frankfurt, Vilnius, and many others, working with conductors like Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Susanna Mälkki, Alan Gilbert, Christoph Eschenbach, Marin Alsop, and Vladimir Jurowski, and has appeared at festivals from Ojai to Paris to Salzburg to Kyoto. Her repertoire ranges from pre-Bach to post-Stockhausen, from concertos to music for flute alone (Stockhausen, Eötvös), from state-of-the art pieces for live video and electronics with Jean-Baptiste Barrière or Claudia Robles to improvisations with Jean-Marc Montera or Taavi Kerikmäe to interdisciplinary projects. Her recordings, in particular those with Kaija Saariaho, have won awards in France, Great Britain and in North America. Camilla Hoitenga has taught at the State University of New York and at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen/Duisburg and continues to give masterclasses and workshops on various subjects for musicians of all ages.

Christian Karlsen (Sweden, 1985) is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most gifted conductors of his generation. Based in the Netherlands, he has worked most of the country’s orchestras including the Hague, Eindhoven, Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestras, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta. He is also a regular guest of the ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble.

Equally in demand in the UK, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia, recent highlights include debuts with Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Other highlights include his participation in the Darmstadt International Music Festival with Stockhausen’s legendary work Carré, Schönberg’s opera Erwartung and Mahler’s 10th Symphony in Amsterdam and the opening of the Gaudeamus Festival. As part of the Umeå European Capital of Culture he conducted the new productions Saiyah by Benjamin Staern and Nox Borealis by Kaija Saariaho at the Norrland Opera.

In 2016 he was appointed Artistic coordinator and artist in residence of the Festival Dag in de Branding.

Having always been a strong advocate for the music of our time, he has led numerous world premieres and collaborated with leading composers such as Kaija Saariaho, Salvatore Sciarrino, Sofia Gubaidulina, Magnus Lindberg, Mark Anthony Turnage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He previously worked as assistant to Esa Pekka Salonen (Philharmonia Orchestra) and with Jac van Steen at the Dortmund Opera. Christian Karlsen studied at the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague.

Thomas Kellner studied acting at the Anton Bruckner Academy in Linz, under the guidance of Julia von Sell, Elke Petri, Peter Wittenberg and Tony de Mayer, and at the National Conservatory for Drama in Paris and the University of Bayreuth. He has worked among others with theatres in Münster, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Berlin, both in classical and contemporary repertoires. He has appeared in telefilms and independent movies, and in the performance Faustfestung by Stefan Kolosko and Nina Ender in Hamburg. In France he has acted at the Studio Théâtre of the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre Bagatelle of Avignon, and the Maison de la Radio. He collaborates with La Chambre aux échos since 2017 and has appeared in the internationally touring performances of Violences and Graal Théâtre.

Taavi Kerikmäe was born on 1976 in Tartu (Estonia). After graduating from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre on classical piano, he studied contemporary music in Conservatoire National Supérieure de Lyon. Currently he is working as a performing artist and composer and teaching experimental music and improvisation in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. Kerikmäe has performed on numerous contemporary music festival (Biennale in Venice, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Nuovo Consonanza in Rome etc,) and worked with such composers as Ivan Fedele, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Vinko Globokar, F.-B. Mâche, Alessandro Solbiatti, Helena Tulve and many others. Kerikmäe has given concerts in most of European countries, USA, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Greenland, and Thailand, has collaborated on improvisation with multiple artists and composed music for several modern dance performances. In 2015, Sumera was awarded the Estonian Cultural Endowment as a “multitalented recitalist and innovative interpreter”. On concerts Taavi is performing with piano, theremin, various synths and keyboards, different live electronics and custom made electronic instruments.

Praised internationally for his performances of the contemporary cello repertoire, Jakob Kullberg, is one of the most established and diverse Danish instrumentalists. Top prize winner at international solo and chamber music competitions, Jakob has been artist in residence with the International Carl Nielsen Competition, the Tivoli Garden Concert Hall as well with Polish institutions such as Orkiestra Muzyki Nowej from Katowice and with the 29th International Krakow Composers’ Festival. Jakob is halfway through a large-scale recording project with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with whom he will release five cello concertos on two CDs. He is twice winner of the Danish Grammy, most recently for his concerto CD ’Momentum’. This CD was also nominated for the Gramophone Award, was Album of the Week with Q2 Music, New York and praised in The Strad Magazine:

”He has a staggering control of tone – sometimes elegant or glassy, at other times angry or pleadingly reedy – and he uses it magnificently to put across Nørgård’s volatile emotions. He’s gloriously intense in Nordheim’s darkhued Tenebrae, and relishes the demanding extended technique in a thrillingly lucid account of Saariaho’s impressionistic Amers, vivid and multicoloured.”

Other high profile orchestras that he regularly appears with include the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Warsaw Symphony (Sinfonia Varsovia), as well as the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian symphony orchestras and Sinfoniettas. He recently made his debut with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, the Croatian Radio Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra and received great praise from his debut with Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra:

”Kullberg showed himself to be another in that extraordinary line of magnificent Scandinavian cello players that have enriched the world in recent years and his performance was greeted with the standing ovation both it and the performance richly deserved.”

He has also played with Finnish orchestras such as the Oulo Symphony Orchestra and Helsinki modern music orchestra, the Avanti! Ensemble with whom he has performed all concerti by Saariaho.

Jakob has returned frequently to prestigious international festivals such as the Aldeburgh Festival, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Huddersfield Festival, Bergen International Festival, and local Copenhagen festivals Njord Biennale and Klang Festival. Jakob enjoys a unique working relationship with the Danish composer Per Nørgård, who has composed and dedicated numerous works for him. The two have developed a rare dialogical collaboration facilitating the cellist as co-creator. Similarly Jakob is also a notable interpreter and collaborator of Bent Sørensen and Kaija Saariaho; who have both composed for him.

Jakob has a special approach to contemporary music, borne out of 20 years of collaboration with Per Nørgård. He has shaped a mode of composer/performer collaboration that places the performer inside the creative process. Not unlike a method-actor Jakob‘s modus operandi has him insisting on being the material, which necessitates being involved with creatively shaping the material in one form or another be it orchestration, cadenza composition, etc. As such Nørgård sanctioned Jakob‘s attempt at a double-concerto called Three Nocturnal Movements, which sees Kullberg in a myriad of creative roles from arrangement through orchestration to actual composition on Nørgård’s material. Jakob recently recorded Kaija Saariaho’s 2nd Cello Concerto, Notes on Light, with his own cadenza on which the composer and he collaborated.

In 2018 Jakob sat on the juries of the Schoenfeld International String Competition in Harbin, China as well as the Karol Szymanowski International Music Competition in Katowice, Poland. Professor of Cello at the Royal College of Music, London he taught for a decade at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. Since 2004 he has been artistic director of the Open Strings Academy, and has given numerous masterclasses throughout Europe and the U.S.A, most recently at the Peabody Conservatory as well as at New York University. He is also an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London and recently finished a four-year research project as Artistic Research Fellow (PhD) at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo.

Petri Kumela, one of Finland’s most versatile and sought-after classical guitarists, is equally at home with period instruments as in working with contemporary composers. He is also one of the Finnish guitarists best known on the international scene, with a reputation for originality and versatility, whether he is giving a recital in Calcutta or a school concert in Japan, or motorising guitars in Mexico.

Winner of the first prize in the international Scandinavian Guitar Festival and Stafford Classical Guitar Recital competitions, Petri Kumela has appeared outside Finland in many European countries, South America, the United States, Russia, Japan, India and Bhutan, at venues that have ranged from intimate domestic concerts to Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, the Purcell Room in London’s Southbank Centre and the Kitara Hall in Sapporo.

An artist with a special commitment to contemporary music, Petri Kumela has premiered countless works both in Finland and abroad and has had many works dedicated to him by f.ex. Paavo Korpijaakko, Uljas Pulkkis, Minna Leinonen, Paola Livorsi, Joachim F.W. Schneider, Riikka Talvitie, Lotta Wennäkoski and Pehr Henrik Nordgren. His partnership with Nordgren alone resulted in six new additions to the Finnish repertoire, from solo works to a concerto, for various instrumental combinations. The nine recordings released so far by Petri Kumela have all won high critical acclaim, from e.g. Helsingin Sanomat, American Record Guide, Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) and the Finnish recording industry’s EMMA prize. In addition, he has made several recordings to YLE and other radio and television networks.

Thomas Lehn (b. 1958) is an author and performer of contemporary music. He studied record engineering and piano at the Music Academy of Detmold, completing his studies at the Music Academy of Cologne on classical and jazz piano, also taking part in the Studio for pianistic interpretation held by prof. Jürgen Uhde. He initiated, in the late 80s, Trio Dario and the Mengano Quartett, performing numerous first performances of commissioned works of the contemporary avant-garde. Parallel to his work as a pianist, his major and widely renown work has been performing and producing live-electronic music. His wide background as an interpreting and improvising pianist in classical, contemporary and jazz, and having been involved in numerous other projects like music theatre, dance, multi-media, and studio production, has developed an individual ‘language’ for electronic music. Thomas Lehn uses analogue synthesizers of the late 1960s, and since 1994 in particular the EMS Synthi A. This modular instrument allows him to spontaneously act in close contact with the various structural degrees of the musical process.

His discography enclosures about 80 CD publications, and he has appeared on major international festivals of contemporary musics and concerts tours in Europe, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, New Zealand, and the USA. His long-term collaborations include ensembles Konk Pack, Toot, Thermal, Futch, Mimeo, Speak Easy, 6IX, Vario-34, and duos with Marcus Schmickler, Tiziana Bertoncini, Gerry Hemingway, Paul Lovens, Frédéric Blondy, Urs Leimgruber and John Butcher. As the pianist and founding member of the ensemble]h[iatus, an ensemble for interpretation and improvisation of contemporary music, he has premiered commissioned works by Vinko Globokar, Peter Jakober, Steffen Krebber, Jennifer Walshe, and Anthony Pateras, besides performing compositions from the contemporary repertoire. In the recent years, Thomas Lehn also also become active as a synthesizer interpreter of electronic compositions, such as Boguslav Schaeffer’s Electronic Symphony at the Huddersfield hcmf in 2017, the world premiere of Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM VI for synthesizer solo at Berlin’s Berghain in 2012, and – together with Klangforum Wien – Austrian composer Peter Jakober’s “dort” for synthesizer and ensemble at musikprotokoll Graz and the Vienna Konzerthaus.

The Finnish soprano Tuuli Lindeberg is one of the leading performers of baroque and contemporary vocal music in her native country. She collaborates regularly with the best chamber orchestras and chamber music ensembles in Finland, and appears frequently as a soloist in oratorios, other choral works and in concert recitals. She is a regular guest soloist of numerous Finnish music festivals and performs regularly on national radio and TV (YLE) in concerts and other music programs. Outside her native country, Ms. Lindeberg has given concerts in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Austria. She has performed with Esa-Pekka Salonen, Reinhard Goebel, Skip Sempé, Aapo Häkkinen, Hannu Lintu, Ville Matvejeff, John Storgårds, Jan Söderblom, Juha Kangas and many other conductors. Tuuli Lindeberg has given several premieres of new vocal works written for her voice. She has done stage roles over the years at e.g. the Finnish National Opera and Finnish National Theatre. Her recent engagements include “E” / Juhani Nuorvala: Flash flash, Woman / Lauri Kilpiö: Mustan veden yli (Over black water), Cleopatra / J.A. Hasse: Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra, Schutzgeist / Kozeluch: Gustav Wasa, Dido / Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, Caroline / Riikka Talvitie: The Judge’s Wife, soprano in the vocal quartet in Only the Sound Remains by Kaija Saariaho, and scenic versions of Monteverdi’s Maria vespers and Orff’s Carmina burana and Catulli carmina. Ms. Lindeberg holds a Master’s degree in vocal performance from the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki. She won the second prize in the national Kangasniemi singing competition in 2009. On the side of her artistic work, Ms. Lindeberg teaches baroque music and singing at the Sibelius Academy and the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre.

Born in Easton, Pennsylvania (USA), Thomas happily now calls Antwerp (Belgium) home – despite momentarily living in many other disparate locals. Moore relocated to Europe in 2002 after graduating from Indiana University. He attended the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands continuing his professional studies, gaining his second Bachelor of Music degree in trombone performance, before gaining his Master’s qualification in trombone performance and chamber music from the Koninklijk Vlaams Conservatorium in Antwerp, Belgium. Thomas now devotes his time to conducting and playing trombone in diverse countries and a variety of genres. He is a conductor and trombonist with Nadar Ensemble, a member of the orchestra at Theater Des Westens, in Berlin, and a regular guest with ChampdAction and Ictus Ensemble. As a soloist, he has premiered works at the World Music Days, Arte No Tempo, the Darmstadt New Music Summer Course, Porto Franko Festival, //hcmf, ‘ZXZW Festival’ and ‘Images Sonores’ Festival. Moore he has also regularly conducted the Orchestra of the Royal Dutch Air Force, was the assistant Musical Director at Les Miserables and is a musical director at the hit Dutch musical, Soldaat van Oranje. In 2018, Thomas began research and a doctorate at the University of Antwerp and the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp in an attempt to “redefine the role of the conductor in new music.”

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish artists who are making a worldwide impact. She studied in Helsinki, Fribourg and Paris. At IRCAM, Saariaho developed techniques of computer-assisted composition and acquired fluency in working with live electronics. This experience influenced her approach to writing for orchestra, with its emphasis on the shaping of dense masses of sound in slow transformations. Significantly, her first orchestral piece, Verblendungen (1984), involves a gradual exchange of roles and character between orchestra and tape. From later nineties, Saariaho has turned to opera, with outstanding success: L’Amour de Loin (2000), Adriana Mater (2006), Emilie (2010) and the oratorio La Passion de Simone (2006) have been performed widely on both sides of the Atlantic. At the moment Saariaho is working on her fifth opera Innocence to be premiered at Festival Aix en Provence 2020. Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards: Grawemeyer Award, Wihuri Prize, Nemmers Prize, Sonning Prize, Polar Music Prize and the BVVA Foundation´s Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

Alexander Schubert (1979) studied bioinformatics and composition. Schubert’s interest explores cross-genre interfaces between acoustic and electronic music, combining different musical styles (like hardcore, free jazz, popular electronic music, techno) with contemporary classical concepts. Schubert has participated in his youth and early career in the above-mentioned genres both in groups and as a solo artist. Furthermore performance pieces are a major focus in his work. The use of the body in electronic music and the transportation of additional content through gestures are key features in his pieces, which aim at empowering the performer and at achieving a maximum of energy. This is done both through the use of sensors and visual media. Apart from working as a composer and solo musician Schubert is also a founding member of ensembles such as “Decoder“. Since 2011 he teaches live-electronics at the conservatory in Lübeck. His works have been performed more than 400 times in the last few years by numerous ensembles in over 25 countries.

Tammo Sumera (1984) has grown in musicians’ family and has been surrounded by music from very young age. He had his first piano lessons by the age of four, learned to play clarinet and saxophone in high school and been involved with music technology for his whole life. Currently he is the head of technology department in Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and a freelance electronic musician specialising in contemporary classical live-electronics. Tammo have worked with most of Estonian composers, conductors and orchestras and have given concerts in bigger parts of Europe, USA and Japan.

Uusinta Ensemble is a contemporary music ensemble founded in 1998 in Helsinki, Finland. The Artistic Director of the ensemble is composer Perttu Haapanen. Uusinta Ensemble has performed in various festivals and cities in Finland, Europe and United States, premiered over a hundred new works and performed more than 180 concerts up to date. International repertoire is the core of the ensemble’s activity, and the ensemble sees as its prime mission to bring the most exciting composers from all countries to its concerts in Helsinki and abroad. Uusinta Ensemble collaborates with the most internationally acclaimed composers of our time. The ensemble has so far recorded five albums, the latest of which consist music from the composer Sebastian Hilli (FI) will be released in 2019/2020.