Bernhard Kontarsky

* 1937 in Remscheid; conductor and pianist; studied at the Musikhochschule Köln and at the UdK Berlin; a specialist in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries; conducted premieres of works by Stockhausen, Cage, Lachenmann and Nono; for many years professor at the HfMDK Frankfurt am Main. In Cologne he studied piano, chamber music, conducting and musicology; he received the Mendelssohn-Preis for chamber music and in 1965 the Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. In the 1960s he came to the Oper Bonn and afterwards to the Staatsoper Stuttgart, where he conducted Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza”, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten” and the premiere of Hans Zender’s “Don Quixote”. At the Oper Frankfurt there followed Hans Werner Henze’s “Das verratene Meer” and “Boulevard Solitude”, the latter also at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. At the Opéra National de Paris and the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg he directed the premieres of Philippe Fénelon’s “Faust”, Georges Aperghis’ “Tristes Tropiques” and Bruno Mantovani’s “L’Autre côté”. From 1981 to 2001 he was professor of piano and of new music at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Three albums connect him with Cybele, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann stands at the centre of two of them. In 2008 he directed the recording of the Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, which in 2010 received the MIDEM Classical Award as Recording of the Year and the Choral Award, appeared on the Bestenliste 1/2009 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and was counted by Gramophone among the 250 most important recordings of all time; in 2017 there followed Bernd Alois Zimmermann and the Late Symphonic Works from the Edition Künstler im Gespräch, awarded the Jahrespreis 2017 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the Opus d’Or. In Johannes Fritsch’s Early Chamber Music (2011) he is heard at the piano together with his brothers Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky.