ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien & Howard Griffiths, Thomas Zehetmair
Biography ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien & Howard Griffiths, Thomas Zehetmair
Howard Griffiths
was born in England and studied at the Royal College of Music in London. He has lived in Switzerland since 1981. From 1996 to 2006 Howard Griffiths was artistic director and chief conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, whose long and excellent tradition he successfully continued and developed extensively. This also included many tours in Europe, the USA and China. The public and the press reacted enthusiastically to this collaboration both in Switzerland and abroad.
From 2007 to 2018 Howard Griffiths was General Music Director of the Brandenburg State Orchestra in Frankfurt. His start to his first season was enthusiastically received in 2007 by the press: «Howard Griffiths immediately made it clear where the journey with him and the state orchestra will go: to lightness, ease and transparency... in addition to all the emotional intensity and expressive simplicity, subtleties and thematic developments suddenly became apparent... That makes us curious and excited about other Griffiths repertoire revelations.» (MOZ)
In addition, he has appeared as a guest conductor with many leading orchestras worldwide; these include the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchester National de France, the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Symphony Orchestra Basel, and the London Mozart Players, the Orquesta Nacional de España, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, various radio orchestras in Germany (the orchestra of the NDR, the Radiophilharmonie Hannover, the Sinfonieorchester des WDR, the hr-Sinfonieorchester, the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie), the Polish Chamber Orchestra and the English Chamber Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia.
Howard Griffiths is also regularly involved in contemporary music. With the Collegium Novum Zurich, he directed the Swiss premiere of Hans Werner Henze‘s Requiem in the presence of the composer and worked closely with composers such as Sofia Gubaidulina, George Crumb, Arvo Pärt and Mauricio Kagel.
Howard Griffiths is always enthusiastic about new, unusual projects: with the Basel Symphony Orchestra he perfor- med Gustav Mahler‘s 8th Symphony, the «Symphony of a Thousand», with over a thousand participants; Together with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra (ZKO), successful crossover projects have been created with Giora Feidman, Roby Lakatos, Burhan Öcal or Abdullah Ibrahim; with great success he also conducted the original music for films by Charles Chaplin live with the ZKO for film projection on a big screen.
More than a hundred and fifty CD recordings on various labels (Warner, Universal, cpo, Sony, Koch and others) testify to Howard Griffiths’ broad artistic spectrum. For example, they contain works by contemporary Swiss and Turkish composers as well as first recordings of rediscovered music from the 18th and 19th centuries. This also includes more than 40 symphonies by Beethoven‘s contemporaries and the early Romanesque. His recordings of all eight symphonies by Beethoven‘s student Ferdinand Ries have received great praise from critics worldwide. The readers of the English magazine «Classic CD» chose Griffiths’ recording of works by Gerald Finzi as «Classic CD of the Year» in this category. The recording of all four Brahms symphonies also received great praise: «... the result is an excitingly pulsating reproduction of the symphonies ... However, such flights of fancy are only possible with a sound body that makes music at the highest level and is based on trust with the conductor. Both apply to the excellent, highly motivated Brandenburg State Orchestra Frankfurt.» (Radioswissclassic)
Thomas Zehetmair
That notion of immersion, of deep engagement with the music, runs like a thread through Thomas Zehetmair’s distinguished and unusually varied musical career as soloist, quartet leader, and conductor. Zehetmair was born in Salzburg in 1961 and has an association with ECM dating back to his early twenties. In his recordings, he has explored some of the peaks of the solo violin repertoire (Paganini’s 24 caprices and Eugène Ysaÿe’s solo sonatas), duets (with violist Ruth Killius, on “Manto and Madrigals”) and, as soloist and conductor, repertoire that includes Bartók, Schoenberg, Veress, and Heinz Holliger. Zehetmair has spoken of virtuosity not as an end in itself but a means to an end: a mastery of all the expressive possibilities that enables access to “the purpose and relationship of every single note in the overall musical architecture”.
"As a listener I want to immerse myself in music, understand its structure and be moved by the beauty of its proportions and the richness of its passions.”
The eponymous Zehetmair Quartet, founded in 1994, bring an almost improvisational quality to the repertoire they play; the fact that their performances are given from memory means they sparkle with the freshness of new discoveries. Their recording of Robert Schumann’s string quartets nos. 1 and 3 was described as “revelatory” by Gramophone magazine, which praised its eschewal of surface gloss in favour of uncovering these works’ profound beauty. That disc won Gramophone Record of the Year in 2003. The Zehetmair Quartet has looked afresh at other monuments of the string quartet repertoire and also made an eloquent case for less familiar masterpieces by composers such as Hartmann, Hindemith, and even Bruckner, as well as producing the first recording of Heinz Holliger’s string quartet, which Zehetmair has called “an explosion of fantasy”.
