Daniel Johannsen & Matthias Krampe
Biography Daniel Johannsen & Matthias Krampe
Daniel Johannsen
"Master of narration. ... A technically outstanding and stylistically highly accomplished approach to the text suggests dreamlike lightness. Everything seems effortless and internalised." This is how the renowned fono forum judges the CD 360° Hugo Wolf, which Daniel Johannsen released in 2022 with the pianist Andreas Fröschl. As a student of Robert Holl and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, lieder singing is indeed a matter of the heart for the tenor, who was born in Vienna in 1978. His repertoire includes some 500 songs from the German-, English- and French-language œuvre, which he performs with duo partners such as Graham Johnson, Charles Spencer and Kristian Bezuidenhout.
Trained as a church musician, he studied singing with Margit Klaushofer at the Vienna Music University and won awards early on (Bach, Schumann, Mozart, Wigmore Hall competitions). Performances have taken him to the music centres of Europe, North America and the Middle East. As one of the most sought-after Bach interpreters of our time, he is a regular guest of the Nederlandse Bachvereniging and the St. Galler Bachstiftung. He appears at important festivals (Styriarte Graz, Enescu Festival), has performed under the direction of renowned conductors such as Nicolaus Harnoncourt or René Jacobs and together with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra or the Staatskapelle Dresden.
In opera, Daniel Johannsen can often be heard interpreting Handel, Mozart and Britten, for example at the Vienna Volksoper, the Munich Gärtnerplatztheater or the Leipzig Opera. Numerous recordings have been released by Carus, Sony and Deutsche Harmonia Mundi; SPEKTRAL released his Wolf album and his first Schubert CD Lieder ohnegleichen (with Christoph Hammer on a Graf grand piano from 1826), which was highly praised by radio and press.
Matthias Krampe
is an extremely versatile musician. He studied concert organ and harpsichord with Michael Radulescu and Gordon Murray. Even during his church music studies before that, he was also intensively involved in piano chamber music and song accompaniment with Rainer Hofmann and Charles Spencer. The recipient of a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation is, among other things, a prize-winner of the Paul Hofhaimer Competition Innsbruck for Early Music and in 1997 was awarded the Würdigungspreis of the Austrian Ministry of Art.
Since 1993, his duties as principal church musician of the Protestant Church in Austria have included extensive concert activity as conductor, organist, harpsichordist and ensemble musician. His concert series "Musik am 12ten" (Music on the 12th) presents monthly music in all instrumentations, from recitals to oratorios, from early music to world premieres. Of particular importance within the series is the intensive cultivation of a neglected or unjustly forgotten repertoire from all epochs, including several first performances from 17th and 18th century sources.
This breadth and historical depth of artistic activity and in particular the intensive study of the various genres of keyboard instruments (organ, harpsichord, fortepiano, grand piano) is the basis of Matthias Krampe's interpretations. Accordingly, he develops, for example, the fortepiano music around 1800 from the specific playing technique of the harpsichord and the musical facture of the art song of this time from an expansion and independence of the continuo practice.
In this self-image, Matthias Krampe brings music back to life in the sound of its time.
