Konstantia Gourzi

The Greek composer and conductor Konstantia Gourzi was born in 1962 in Athens and studied at the Conservatory there before transferring to the Academy of the Arts in Berlin in 1987. In Berlin she served for a time as an assistant to Claudio Abbado; there she founded the attacca berlin ensemble as well as the concert series “Zeitzonen,” and from 1999 to 2007 she led the Echo ensemble. Since 2002 she has been a professor at the Munich Academy of Music, where she established the octopus ensemble to perform modern music. As a conductor Gourzi has appeared with such ensembles as the RSO Stuttgart, the Munich Radio Orchestra, the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Her compositions have been performed at festivals throughout Europe, Israel, Japan, and the United States. She is especially committed to genre-bending projects that bring contemporary music into contact with other art forms.

August 2016