Matthias Pintscher, who was born in 1971 in Marl, Germany, considers composing and conducting to be complementary spheres of his art. He studied composition with Giselher Klebe in Detmold and with Manfred Trojahn in Düsseldorf. Hans Werner Henze, who in 1990 invited the young composer to the Cantiere summer festival for young musicians held at Montepulciano, has been one of his supporters, together with Peter Eötvös, with whom Pintscher undertook a seminar in composition and who taught him conducting. Matthias Pintscher advanced with unusual speed to become recognized as one of the most successful composers of the younger generation. His music theater works Thomas Chatterton and L’Espace dernier were premiered by the Dresden Semperoper and the Paris Opera, respectively, while his orchestral pieces have been performed by the Berlin Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra; additionally, the Salzburg Festival presented his music as part of its “next generation” series, and he served as “composer-in-residence” at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL in 2006. As a conductor, Matthias Pintscher made contemporary music his priority at first, but in recent years his repertoire has expanded to encompass works of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on French music and on the compositions of Anton Bruckner and of the Second Viennese School. Pintscher has conducted the Cleveland Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin. In 2009 he led the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert honoring the 75th birthday of Claudio Abbado and he was artistic director of the Melbourne Symphony's MetropolisFestival. In the 2010-11 season he begins his three-year tenure as "artist-in-association" with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; additionally, he makes his debut with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and with the Bamberg Symphony.
Matthias Pintscher makes his LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut as a conductor with this concert.
May 2010