Ilse Eerens, Ryoko Aoki, Mario Caroli, Residentie Orkest The Hague & Jun Märkl
Biographie Ilse Eerens, Ryoko Aoki, Mario Caroli, Residentie Orkest The Hague & Jun Märkl
Ilse Eerens
Praised for her luminous voice, musical sensitivity and versatility, Belgian soprano Ilse Eerens enjoys an international operatic and concert career, featuring repertoire that spans from Bach to contemporary works. Recent highlights include returns to La Monnaie as Sophie (Der Rosenkavalier) and Salzburger Festspiele as First Lady (Die Zauberflöte) as well as Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium on tour with Nederlands Kamerkoor; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem with the Gulbenkian Orchestra; Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé with NDR Vokalensemble; and various programmes with Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Ton Koopman.
Eerens has worked with conductors such as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Riccardo Muti, Hartmut Haenchen, Lorenzo Viotti, Kazushi Ono, HK Gruber, Philippe Herreweghe, Peter Dijkstra, Richard Egarr, Laurence Equilbey, Jean-Christophe Spinosi and Antonello Manacorda, and various ensembles including the Orchestre National de France, Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, MDR-Sinfonie-orchester, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Brussels Philharmonic, Cappella Mediterranea and Beethoven Orchester Bonn, among others.
Mario Caroli
studied with Annamaria Morini in Bologna and Manuela Wiesler in Vienna. At the age of 22, he won the coveted Kranichsteiner Musikpreis and began a highly successful career as a solo flautist. Toshio Hosokawa, Salvatore Sciarrino, György Kurtág, Doina Rotaru and many other esteemed contemporary composers have written works and concertos for him. A unique figure among the flautists of today, Caroli is capable of moving from classical compositions to the most extreme contemporary pieces with the same vivid virtuosity, vibrant personality and analytic and aesthetical rigorous approach.
Critically acclaimed for his refreshing interpretations of Bach, Schubert and Debussy, he has appeared as a soloist with more than 250 orchestras at prestigious festivals and concert halls around the world, and has recorded over 60 albums.
A cosmopolitan and polyglot artist, Caroli is also one of the most in-demand flute teachers today, and is a professor at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg where he teaches a very successful international flute class.
Ryoko Aoki
holds a unique position in the field of Noh theatre as a female singer and performer. She has performed in several traditional Noh plays, historically the reserve of male actors. Above all, she is the pioneer of and inspiration for a new artistic form combining utai (traditional Noh recitation) with contemporary music. More than 55 works have been written for her by various composers including Peter Eötvös, Toshio Hosokawa, Stefano Gervasoni, José María Sánchez-Verdú and Oliver Schneller.
She has performed with ensembles and orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Remix Ensemble, Münchener Kammerorchester, Arditti Quartet, Quatuor Diotima and the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra.
As part of her Noh x Contemporary Music project, Ryoko Aoki has commissioned a series of new works for Noh voice. A recording of some of these compositions, including Peter Eötvös’s Harakiri, was released in 2014.
Ryoko Aoki obtained a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Music with a focus on the Kanze school of Noh theatre, before gaining a PhD from the University of London.
Jun Märkl
is a highly respected interpreter of core Germanic repertoire and is renowned for his refined and idiomatic explorations of the French Impressionists. He currently serves as music director of the Taiwan National Symphony Orchestra and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and is the chief conductor of the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague, Netherlands. He is also principal guest conductor of the Oregon Symphony.
Märkl’s expertise in the world of opera and long relationships with the state operas of Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Berlin, Semperoper Dresden, The Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera and New National Theatre in Tokyo have been complemented over the past decades by his orchestral music directorships of the Orchestre National de Lyon, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Basque National Orchestra and the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. Märkl regularly guest conducts leading international orchestras, and has led The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo, among many others.
He also has an extensive discography of over 55 recordings, and in 2012 he was honoured with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He studied in Munich with Sergiu Celibidache and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. Märkl is highly dedicated to work with young musicians: for many years he worked as principal conductor at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo and the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. He teaches as a guest professor at the Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo and recently founded the National Youth Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan.
