I am a musician, singer, and historical keyboard player and conductor (Huelgas Ensemble Belgium + Ensemble Cinquecento Wien)
My home, my ‘patria’, my ‘matria’ is where I am feeling welcomed, safe and am actually living. My cultural origin is the German language (I grew up in Munich, in the south of Bavaria), nevertheless I am treated as a stranger everywhere. Yes, my antecedents come all from this planet earth, no mars or else involved, same family as yours. I have lived for more than 40 years abroad, meaning on road, through studies and work in Basel, Geneva, London, Alicante, Paris, Madrid etc.
I live now with my husband and a cat in Madrid and also on an Off Grid Finca in full Nature.
Practicing every day somatic retuning/intuning/meditation with endless (or shall I say beginningless) thanks to Godfrey.
I am fascinated by the macrobiotic way of living, though plant based whole food is my daily pleasure/need delivery.
I am seeing the need for permaculture and an ‘integral way’ of living.
I don’t like dogma.
I like the playing of Gustav Leonhardt and Daniil Trifonov, and the singing of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, James Bowman and Janet Baker and probably many others. Even though I perform a big amount of beautiful renaissance polyphony, I also always performed the German romantic Lied repertoire as well as JSBach’s music, Purcell, Monteverdi and all the countless others.
I obviously like music. When I was even younger, I was very critical and now I am perhaps more comfortable with less criticism, yet still not to be fooled about quality. In general (which does exist only as a fantasy) I prefer chamber music and all intimate music which remembers and leads to, or comes from stillness.
I like the writing of Heine, Kleist, Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, Roth, Rilke, Hesse, Bichsel, Haratischwili, Kehlmann, Gogol, Thomas Bernhard, Dostojewski and countless others.
David Hockney, Van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Baselitz, Kiefer, Richter, Twombly, Fra Angelico, Eisenstein, Barceló etc are doors you better enter and see yourself: …it is totally my thing.
When I was younger (other epochs of time) I went every free evening to the theatre of any kind (opera, drama or cinema) and into a bar or home to friends with friends to talk laugh and discuss every dust of this matrix of life. I confess I miss it a little bit. When I was younger I played like a transformed narcotic during nights on the organ and finished the session after eight hours with a coffee down beside the church and subsequently went to the music history lessons of a boring typical ‘professor’ at the conservatory for a deep nap. I am not a musicologist as you can guess. I am a practitioner who believes that one understands the historical times of Shakespeare better through Shakespeare’s works, than Shakespeare’s work through the historical lessons. Translate it into music. I am very curious though and adore the information of musicologists. I admit that when I studied at the ‘Schola Cantorum Basiliensis’ in Switzerland I began to like history lessons. The conservatory in Basel was a sheer pleasure to me. Everything was different then (also in comparison to most other music conservatories!), no Bologna competition credit system disturbed the creative process of growing into an almost impossible profession.
My teacher Kurt Widmer then was the true cliché of a Master and I had lessons every single day and was treated like a family member. Now everything is business and management, elbow and winning, pretending and advantage. It takes a certain amount of courage to stay away from all this corset like ‘fitting in’.
It is only fair to myself to mention my ten years time in Alicante/Spain, where I founded a chamber choir and a little festival around it for ‘ancient music’. It was an incredible creative time with lovely euphoric people who supported my ideas without doubts.
Recently I discovered the delicious taste of yet another Chinese tea. GongFu brewing is my preferred style. Raw PuErh is my favourite. Japanese can’t stay unmentioned.
I don’t use Facebook but am into drawing my own ‘world-book-poems’ instead.
I am teaching eventually with big pleasure, and work with Burga Schwarzbach’s Body disposition for Singers (and not singers). A very somatic approach, the body as an experience of the whole, to singing.
Since around 2008 I have been a member of the Belgian Huelgas Ensemble (medieval- and renaissance-polyphony) and since 2012 I have been a member of the Ensemble Cinquecento in Wien. I love both ways of letting this music thrive into modern life. With Cinquecento we are five guys, with Huelgas we are mostly 10 to 12 singers, meaning two voices per part in sacred work and one voice per part in the madrigal and chanson genre.
In 2027 I will overtake the artistic direction of the Huelgas Ensemble, if life allows me to go there. Until then I am conducting ‘here and there’ a concert, naming in August 2025 at the festival of Laus Polyphonia in Antwerpen.
I am married to the dancer, singer, yoga teacher and florist Sergio Teodosio. Love is all there is.
You can write me here if you desire:
from heart to heart 