Performers
For five decades, Thomas Quasthoff has set standards on international stages and reached and moved countless people with his art. Over the course of his career, he has performed with all the leading orchestras and has appeared on all the major concert stages and at major festivals as a lieder and concert singer. He has worked closely with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph Eschenbach, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, Helmuth Rilling, Christian Thielemann and Franz Welser-Möst.
Thomas Quasthoff has been ‘Artist in Residence’ at the Vienna Musikverein, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Carnegie Hall, the Lucerne Festival, Baden-Baden, Hamburg, London's Wigmore Hall and the Barbican Centre. He has received numerous national and international honours, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Three of his recordings have won a Grammy and six have been honoured with the Echo Award.
When Thomas Quasthoff brings his new programme ‘FOR YOU’ to life, he is one thing above all - absolutely authentic. Quasthoff has a sleepwalking instinct for the appropriate style of what he sings. This applies to opera arias, art and folk songs as well as jazz, pop and soul. He has long since proven that, as a classical singer with an enormously versatile bass-baritone, he can also master genres that are rooted in the African-American musical tradition.
And so what is so appreciated about Quasthoff as a lieder singer also becomes the golden rule for everything else: ‘He places his own personality entirely at the service of music and text. He wants to exclude the artificial, to reach his listeners through truthfulness’, to quote one critic's opinion. How the bass-baritone lives up to his claim of really touching people with his voice is clear from audience reactions and the hymns of praise from the press continue to document the fascination and enthusiasm that he is able to trigger in his listeners with his exceptional voice. Now he wants to give something back to his audience, who have remained loyal to him over the years - with ‘FOR YOU’!
He is supported by three excellent jazz musicians: Dieter Ilg is something like the doyen of German jazz. His electrifying vitality, intelligent curiosity, technical brilliance and total dedication to the moment characterise him. Wolfgang Haffner is Germany's best-known drummer - with an unrivalled career that extends far beyond jazz. Haffner has this floating lightness - at the same time his playing is dense, compact - he swings ravishingly, and he rocks. Even when he really goes for it, he has an immense instinct and is sure to pick up every note, no matter how quiet, from the other musicians. Simon Oslender is the youngest member of the band - once entering the scene as a ‘wunderkind on the Hammond organ’, the now 24-year-old Simon Oslender is regarded as one of the ‘rising stars’ of the German music scene on piano, organ and keyboards.
(Karsten Jahnke Konzertdirektion)