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.

Composer, conductor, and chansonnier HK Gruber was awarded Austria’s most prestigious cultural prize, the Grand Austrian State Prize, in 2002. In 2009, he was named an honorary member of the Vienna Konzerthaus, and he is an Honorary Lifetime Trustee of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. Highlights of his 2023–2024 season include conducting the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in an all-Gruber portrait concert at the Vienna Konzerthaus, and a portrait weekend with the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz.

Mr. Gruber’s compositions have been written for and performed by leading orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Berliner Philharmoniker. He is particularly noted for his concertos, including Aerial for trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, which has received more than 60 performances, and the Cello Concerto for Yo-Yo Ma. His operas include Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Tales from the Vienna Woods), premiered at the Bregenz Festival in 2014. His most recent orchestral work, Short Stories from the Vienna Woods, was co-commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and premiered in 2022.

Mr. Gruber’s conducting career includes engagements with the Vienna Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he was composer-conductor with the BBC Philharmonic from 2009 to 2015.

Mr. Gruber has performed extensively as chansonnier, most notably in Frankenstein!!, his most popular work, which he premiered with Sir Simon Rattle and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in 1978 and has received more than 600 performances around the world. He has also performed and recorded as chansonnier in the works of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, as well as Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King.

Mr. Gruber’s discography encompasses a wide range of repertoire that includes his own music on the BIS and Chandos labels, music by Brett Dean for BIS, and works by Kurt Schwertsik with the BBC Philharmonic for Chandos. His recording of Gottfried von Einem’s Der Prozess with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was awarded the prestigious Diapason d’Or and Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2019. His most recent release—Weill symphonies with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra on BIS—has received widespread critical acclaim, with The New York Times describing him as “a standard-setting interpreter of Weill’s music.”

Irish Canadian mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta has been praised by Opera News for her “delectably rich, silver-toned mezzo-soprano.” In 2018, she was named Young Singer of the Year at the International Opera Awards and Young Artist of the Year by The Arts Desk. She performs a diverse repertoire, bringing her to stages around the world including the Metropolitan Opera, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Opéra National de Lyon, Oper Frankfurt, Dallas Opera, BBC Proms, and Royal Swedish Opera. In 2024, she debuts at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with the Vienna Symphony performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Opéra de Lausanne as Dorabella in Così fan tutte, the Tivoli Festival in recital with the Absalon Quartet, and Montreal’s Maison symphonique as Carmen. She also stars at the Vienna Volksoper as the title role in the Austrian premiere of John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary.

In 2023, Ms. Giunta debuted at the Komische Oper Berlin performing Berio’s Folk Songs, Staatstheater Darmstadt as the Gymnasiast in Berg’s Lulu, and Opéra Comique in Paris reprising the role of Dodo in Breaking the Waves by Missy Mazzoli; she also created the role of Elisabeth in the world premiere of Eggert’s Die letzte Verschwörung in Vienna.

Ms. Giunta is a passionate champion of the music of Kurt Weill, in particular The Seven Deadly Sins. She has performed the work with the Toronto Symphony, Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, and Oregon Music Festival; and at Lincoln Center, Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio, Alte Oper Frankfurt, and Dacamera Houston; and in the British premiere of the arrangement by HK Gruber and Christian Muthspiel, live-streamed globally with Opera North in 2020.

She is the recipient of the 2016 Bernard Diamant Prize and several major grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the 2013 Novick Career Advancement Grant, the 2013 Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Award, and multiple prizes from the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers. Ms. Giunta is a graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio, and received artist diplomas in opera studies from both The Juilliard School and the Glenn Gould School at Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music.

amarcord, founded by former members of the St. Thomas Boys Choir of Leipzig, celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2022. Raised in the tradition of this more-than-800-year-old choir and its former director, J. S. Bach, amarcord is now one of the world’s most renowned vocal ensembles. Having performed approximately 2,500 concerts in more than 50 countries, these multi-award–winning singers bring their passion for vocal music alive. Their outstanding musical ability, stupendous vocal technique, charming stage presence, and marvelous sense of humor make their concerts an emotionally unique experience.

At home in all styles of classical vocal music, amarcord loves to go beyond boundaries in its programs, which can be heard on nearly 30 albums and in collaborations with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, St. Thomas Boys Choir, lautten compagney Berlin, Daniel Hope, Nils Mönkemeyer, Eric Schneider, the Klenke Quartet, Ensemble Modern, and many others.

As founders and hosts of the annual International Festival for Vocal Music “a cappella” in their hometown of Leipzig, the singers have made the festival one of the leading events of its kind, including a competition and showcase for young up-and-coming a cappella ensembles.

Numerous recordings have earned amarcord a string of awards and bear impressive testimony to its diverse repertoire. The latest release, Meisterklasse, is devoted to Carl Reinecke—one of the most influential artists to hail from the musical city of Leipzig—and his students. In 2019, amarcord’s first co-production with Calmus Ensemble was released. Entitled Leipziger Disputation, it was crowned with an OPUS Klassik Award for Choral Recording of the Year. At the heart of the recording is the 12-part mass Et ecce terrae motus by Antoine Brumel. In addition, amarcord released an album of works by Kurt Weill that was recorded with Ensemble Modern and directed by HK Gruber. Folks and Tales earned amarcord its sixth Contemporary A Cappella Recording Award in 2014—the “a cappella Oscar,” which honors the best a cappella productions worldwide.