Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra

Although all of Glière’s most important compositions were written in the twentieth century, his style of work places him firmly at the Russian romantic tradition. The symphony by Berlioz is a piece of program music with a title of “An Episode in the Life of an Artist”. It is widely regarded as one of the most important and representative pieces of the early Romantic period.

Concerts:

• July 9th, 2010 / 7.00 p.m. / MACM
• July 10th, 2010 / 4.00 p.m. / MACM

Conductor:

Ligia Amadio

Soloist:

Christoph Ess, French Horn

Program:

• Thai Traditional Music
• Reinhold Glière: Horn Concerto in B-flat major, op.91
• Hector Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, op.14

Christoph Ess

Christoph Ess was born 1984 in Tübingen, Germany, where he received his first french horn lessons from Peter Hoefs when he was seven years old. Since 2003 he has been studying with Christian Lampert and Wolfgang Wipfler at the music academy Basel and the Stuttgart Musikhochschule where he graduated with honors in 2008. In addition, renowned teachers like Erich Penzel, Michael Höltzel and Radovan Vlatkovic have contributed to his artistic development.

He has received scholarships for excellence from the German National study foundation and the German music foundation. He is a six-fold first prize winner of the German national competition „Jugend musiziert“ and has also won numerous prizes on an international level: He is a laureate of the European Classic Festival „Concerto per Corno“ 2002, of the Concorso D. Ceccarossi 2003 and of the competitions in Telfs/Austria 2004 and Brno/Czech Republic 2006. In September 2005 he became a prize-winner in the prestigous „International ARD music competition“ in Munich and in the following year he won first prizes in the Richard-Strauss competition and the „Concorso Internazionale per Corno di Sannicandro di Bari“. Finally, in 2007 he was awarded the first prize and no less than seven of the special prizes at the famous „Prague Spring“ international music competition and in 2008 the prize for the best soloist performance from the „Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern“. In 2009 he received a scholarship from the „Deutscher Musikrat“.

As a soloist he has appeared with numerous renowned orchestras including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, the Munich, Stuttgart and Salzburg Chamber Orchestras and the Basel Symphony Orchestra. In 2007, he gave his debut at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall together with the DSO Berlin.

Christoph Ess has been the principal horn of the Young German Philharmony and the European Union Youth Orchestra. He also played at the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Bavarian State Opera Munich, the Tonhalle-Orchestra Zurich, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Ensemble Modern. During the 2005/2006 he assumed the position of the third horn player at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra before becoming solo horn player in the Essen Philharmonic orchestra. In August 2007, he has taken on a permanent position as principal horn in the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Conductors he has worked with include Riccardo Muti, Mariss Jansons, Bernard Haitink, Sir Neville Marriner, Sir Colin Davis, Jonathan Nott, Andrey Boreyko, David Zinman, Daniel Harding, Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, Pierre Boulez, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Adam Fischer.

As a chamber musician, he has been invited to numerous festivals including the Prague Spring, the Schleswig-Holstein, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Rheingau music festival. In addition, together with his pianist he has recorded works by Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Reinecke, Raff, Labor, Strauss, Vignery, Hindemith, Kirchner and Trojan for several national and international radio stations.