Carnegie Hall

Ensemble Modern is a loudspeaker for the music of our time: courageous, uncompromising, and energetic. An essential, aesthetically polyglot amplifier for trendsetting sound concepts, it is one of the best-known new music ensembles in the world. Founded in 1980 and based in Frankfurt am Main, the group consists of 18 soloists who determine the activities of this democratically organized ensemble. The musicians (from Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Switzerland, and the US) jointly decide on artistic projects, partnerships with other artists, and all financial matters. Its aesthetic spectrum includes musical theater works, dance and multimedia projects, chamber music, and ensemble and orchestral concerts. Tour and guest appearances regularly take Ensemble Modern to renowned festivals throughout the world and major national and international performance venues.

Ensemble Modern rehearses an average of 70 new works every year, 20 of which are world premieres, some of them commissioned by the ensemble itself. The works are mostly rehearsed in close collaboration with their composers. Ensemble Modern’s concept and goal is to achieve the highest possible precision in implementing a composer’s ideas. Its work is characterized by extraordinary and often long-term cooperative ventures with musicians such as John Adams, Mark Andre, George Benjamin, Unsuk Chin, Peter Eötvös, Brian Ferneyhough, Heiner Goebbels, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Cathy Milliken, Brigitta Muntendorf, Olga Neuwirth, Enno Poppe, Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca Saunders, Iris ter Schiphorst, Simon Steen-Andersen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Frank Zappa, Hans Zender, and Vito Žuraj, as well as outstanding artists from other fields.

Ensemble Modern has run its own label, Ensemble Modern Media, since 2000. Additional audio recordings, approximately 150 so far, have been released by other labels. In 2003, the International Ensemble Modern Academy was founded to bundle Ensemble Modern’s education activities. Its goal is to convey the artistic movements of our time as well as an open, creative manner of dealing with artistic processes.

A regular guest with leading orchestras worldwide, Stefan Asbury started his 2022–2023 season with visits to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and the Indianapolis and Tulsa symphony orchestras, followed by engagements with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, and NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra.

Recent seasons saw Mr. Asbury return to and debut with several orchestras around the world, including the Copenhagen Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Resonanz in Hamburg, Pacific Philharmonia Tokyo, Auckland Philharmonia, and China National Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra as part of Beethovenfest in Bonn and Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao during Bilbao’s Musika-Música festival in 2019.

Mr. Asbury has strong relationships with many living composers, including Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, Unsuk Chin, and Mark-Anthony Turnage. In the 2015–2016 season, he conducted the world premiere of Bernd Richard Deutsch’s organ concerto at the Musikverein in Vienna. In the 2014–2015 season, he conducted the world premiere of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s piano concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and also gave the US premiere with Mr. Aimard and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Following the sad passing of Oliver Knussen, a very close mentor, Mr. Asbury conducted his last completed composition with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in 2018.

Mr. Asbury’s album with works by Jonathan Harvey was awarded a Monde de la musique CHOC award, and his complete cycle of Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne won a Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

In 2013, Mr. Asbury conducted the world premiere of Michael Jarrell’s Siegfried Nocturne at the Wagner Geneva Festival. Other opera highlights include Porgy and Bess at the Spoleto Festival, John Adams’s A Flowering Tree for the Perth Festival, Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz for the Wiener Festwochen, Britten’s Owen Wingrave with Tapiola Sinfonietta, and Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are at Tanglewood. He also collaborated with the Copenhagen Philharmonic and Danish Dance Theatre on a new production of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, appeared with the Mark Morris Dance Group in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and led Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts at Lincoln Center, London’s Barbican, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Since 1995, Mr. Asbury has served on the faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center and has held the Sana H. Sabbagh Master Teacher Chair on the conducting faculty since 2005.