The German conductor, Thomas Hengelbrock, is one of the most promising and creative music personalities of his generation. Following his acclaimed debut as an opera conductor at the Vienna Festival in 1993 in the Theater an der Wien with Gluck’s Alceste, a co-production with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, there followed performances of Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride in Berlin and Vienna and W.A. Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Bonn opera house, for which he was named Best Conductor of the Year by the music critics of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Thomas Hengelbrock's opera productions have been highly successful. These include Purcell’s King Arthur in Prague, Copenhagen and Paris, Béla Bartók’s Count Bluebeard in Berlin and works which Hengelbrock has discovered in archives and revived: Alessandro Scarlatti’s Mitridate Eupatore at the Ambrasser Schlosskonzerte in Innsbruck and the Schwetzingen Festival, and Galuppi’s Il filosofo di campagna (the philosopher in the country) in Potsdam.
In the forefront of Thomas Hengelbrock’s work is a creative dialogue with other artists, which has generated not only a number of premieres (by Benedict Mason, Marc-André Dalbavie, Yoram Paporic, Quigang Chen and others) but also experimental links. In January 1995, he was elected artistic director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. |