Musical Belongings III

Born in Beijing, Lucy Zhao began learning the pipa 琵琶 – a plucked bowl-necked lute used in classical Chinese music and one of the most popular Chinese instruments – at the age of eight. The history of the pipa goes back more than 1500 years. Lucy performed as a member of the pipa orchestra at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. She completed a bachelor’s degree in pipa at the China Conservatory in Beijing and took part in orchestra tours to the USA, South Korea and numerous Chinese cities. In 2016, Lucy moved to Vienna to study cultural management. Since then, she has been active in many ensembles and orchestras in Europe. She has also continued her solo engagements with concerts in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Slovenia and Slovakia, e.g. at the Konzerthaus Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, Haus für Mozart in Salzburg and Mozarthaus Vienna. In addition to her traditional repertoire, she also plays contemporary music and free improvisations – sonic and emotional journeys into untouched spheres that try to cast a spell over her. The musician has been teaching the pipa at the Global Music School since July 2021 and is currently working in event management at the Konzerthaus Berlin after graduating.

Lin Chen is a versatile Chinese percussionist who has lived in Germany since 2006. She studied at the Franz Liszt University of Music in Weimar and in Hamburg, where she graduated with honours in 2011.
Performances as a soloist and with various ensembles and orchestras have taken Lin Chen to China, Japan, Hong Kong, Finland, Austria, the USA, Australia and numerous German cities. She has performed as a soloist with Beibei Wang under the direction of Tan Dun in “Water Passion” and played drums with Martin Grubinger’s Percussive Planet Ensemble at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. In 2022, she played together with Beibei Wang as a soloist as well as an intermezzo with Chinese bass drums at the Haniel Klassik Open Air in Duisburg in front of 8000 spectators. She also regularly plays the marimba in the musical “The Lion King” at the Stage Theatre in Hamburg and in the Hamburg Staatsoper concert series “Blubb blubb – abgetaucht!” Music theatre for babies, and much more.

She has been performing with her husband, guitarist Kristian Sievers, in the Duo Pertar since 2013. In 2022, she debuted her percussion quintet with four other Chinese percussionists.

lin-chen-percussion.com

Lung-Yi Huang graduated from Fo Guang University and Chinese Culture University (Chinese Music Division). He won the first prize twice in National Music Competitions in Taiwan. As a recipient of the 1998 Young Star Series, he made his debut at the National Recital Hall in Taipei. In addition to traditional Chinese music, Huang also has a strong interest in contemporary music and has premiered several contemporary compositions. Huang has appeared at the festivals such as MaerzMusik in Berlin, the Contemporary Music Festival in Grenoble, the Hudders Field Contemporary Music Festival in UK, and the Viktring Modern Music Festival near Klagenfurt. Lung-Yi Huang is currently the CEO and Artistic Director of Taipei Harmony Ensemble, and has a lectureship at the Chinese Culture University, National Taiwan College of Performing Arts, and Hwa Kang Arts School.

Tzu-Ning Liao is a versatile musician from Taiwan. She has lived in Germany since 2017. She graduated in erhu – a two-stringed bowed fiddle also known as Chinese violin – and piano at the National Taiwan University of Arts. At the age of ten, she became a member of the Dachung Chinese Orchestra and played regularly with the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra (LGCCO) at the National Concert Hall in Taipei. In addition to numerous performances in Taiwan, she has been invited to Japan, Australia, Beijing and Shanghai, among others.

In 2017, she moved to Germany to study multimedia composition at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre and developed her unique style on the erhu. Her artistic focus is on new music, contemporary arranged traditional music, electro-acoustic music and free improvisation. She has played with various European instruments in international ensembles, for example in the performance of “Intermezzi” by composer Yijie Wang for the Duisburg Philharmonic Orchestra in 2022 or in the Chinese electronic, intercultural music and dance performance “Re: member, a double concerto” in Bonn and Lübeck. She also took part in the contemporary chamber opera “ZER-RIS-SEN. Wenji: In Search of Home” by composer Lam-Bun Ching, which was performed in Heidelberg and Ludwigsburg in 2019.

The German-Chinese artist Young-Shin Kim was born in Seoul and came to Germany as a young child. After classical dance training, she appeared in numerous television films, including four appearances in the “Tatort” series. At the Berlin Volksbühne, she performed with Frank Castorf in “Nord” by Louis Ferdinand Céline (Avignon, Wiener Festwochen, Barcelona, Berlin) and in “Der Idiot” after Dostoyevsky. She played and danced Li-Si in Ueli Jäggi’s production of Sean O’Casey’s “The End of the Beginning” at the Lucerne Theatre. In the production “Agora” by Greek director Michael Marmarinos, also at the Volksbühne, she played the leading role of the tour guide.

She worked as a choreographer for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in “The Turn of the Screw”. For the first time she directed her own play “Farben” based on Goethe’s Theory of Colours (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in cooperation with the Goethe Institute). For national and international cinema, she has made films such as “Der Fischer und seine Frau” with Doris Dörrie and played the young prostitute Kim in the drama “Unschuld” based on Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen” by Andreas Morell. Her CV also includes action comedies such as the Hungarian-American production “ARGO 2”, in which she played the ninja daughter of a Japanese syndicate à la Kill Bill.

Zheng Xiaoqiong (born 1980) is a Chinese poet who won the prestigious Liqun Literature Prize in 2007. Until then, she had worked as a migrant labourer in a metal goods factory in Dongguan in Guangdong province and had only published a few poems. In 2012, she published her first volume of poetry, 女工记 (The Book of Women Workers), in which she portrays female migrant workers based on her own experiences and numerous interviews. Since then, five more volumes have been published and her texts have been translated into German, English, French, Japanese and Turkish, among other languages. Zheng Xiaoqiong is also a regular guest at international literature festivals. Her poetry conveys the reality of everyday life in factories as well as the effects of global capitalism on nature.

Poems in German have been published in: Chinabox: New Poetry from the People’s Republic (Edition Polyphon) – 2016, edited by Lea Schneider, Verlagshaus Berlin.

The lautten compagney BERLIN under the direction of Wolfgang Katschner is one of the most renowned early music orchestras. In the 39 years since its founding in 1984, it has delighted music lovers all over the world. In autumn 2019, it was awarded the OPUS Klassik as Ensemble of the Year. It sets unique musical accents with concerts, opera performances and crossover projects. The ensemble is one of the few independent producers of music theatre projects in Germany. For its unusual and innovative programmes, it is appreciated by audiences as well as national and international critics. In addition to its performances in Berlin, the lautten compagney tours Germany, Europe and the world with about 100 concerts a year. The last major non-European tours took them to ten cities in China in 2019 and to Bogotá in Colombia in autumn 2021. The lautten compagney recently performed the acclaimed premiere of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” at the Semperoper in Dresden, the first guest ensemble to do so in the opera house’s recent history.

The lautten compagney cultivates musical traditions as an important part of its programme spectrum with great repertoire works. Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble are not only curious about music, but also about new ways of presenting it in concert. The lautten compagney has found its own individual platform for experimentation with the :lounge format, among others. Here it demonstrates that early music and contemporary music can indeed be combined. In the :lounge, live sampling and sounds enrich the timbres of the baroque instruments and offer space for surprising improvisations. When old works are inspired by new ideas in this way, musical boundaries disappear.

lautten compagney BERLIN

lautten compagney BERLIN – YouTube

A lutenist by training, Wolfgang Katschner founded the lautten compagney BERLIN together with Hans-Werner Apel in 1984, the centrepiece of his multifaceted work as a musician, organiser and researcher in the sound worlds of “early music”.

On CDs, Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble present themselves as border crossers; alongside world premiere recordings of operas such as “Didone abbandonata” are unusual combinations of composers: Philipp Glass and Tarquinio Merula (“Timeless”), Heinrich Schütz and Friedrich Hollaender (“War & Peace”) and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Astor Piazzolla (“Misterio”). Each of these programmes stands for the conviction that “early” music is just as modern as music written later and, once one steps out of one’s self-imposed isolation as a musician of “early” music, can be combined with modern repertoire in an extremely profitable way for musicians and audiences alike.

For some years now, Wolfgang Katschner has also been successfully appearing as a guest conductor at German opera houses. In 2012-2016 he was musical director of the Winter in Schwetzingen; after guest appearances in Bonn (Handel’s “Rinaldo” and “Giulio Cesare”) and Oldenburg (Hasse’s “Siroe”), he was responsible for several opera productions at the Nuremberg State Theatre: “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria”, “Serse”, “La Calisto” and “Bajazet”. Most recently, Katschner conducted Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” at the Semperoper Dresden.

Wolfgang Katschner is also increasingly involved in the training of young artists. He was a guest professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin, at the Sing-Fest in Hong Kong, artist in residence at BarockVokal in Mainz and worked with singers at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar in 2018 and 2019.

Christian Filips is a poet, music dramaturge, director and translator. He studied philosophy, literature and musicology in Vienna and Berlin. Since 2006 he has been working as a freelance author, director and music dramaturge for the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, for the lautten compagney BERLIN and for the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, among others. As a music dramaturge, he specializes in hybrid formats combining early and contemporary music, literature, performance and action art. As a theater maker, he has developed immersive productions for urban space together with partners in Mumbai and Nairobi. As a translator, he collaborated with the Arab-German collective WIESE (Wie es ist) / مرج (for Hamburger Bahnhof, among others). Filips is currently working with poets Logan February (Nigeria) and Lionel Fogarty (Australia) on the project POESIE DEKOLONIE with Engeler Verlag. The first volume published was “Mental Voodoo: Gedichte“ by Logan February. In April 2023 he curated the festival for world literature POETICA 8 at the University of Cologne. In August 2023, he received the Erlangen Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation. Most recently, the poetry collection Im Traum die Auskunft sagt: Hier! Selected poems 1996-2022 was published by Engeler Verlag.