Knabenchor Hannover, London Brass & Jörg Breiding
Biography Knabenchor Hannover, London Brass & Jörg Breiding
The Knabenchor Hanover
was founded by Prof. Heinz Hennig in 1950 and was conducted by him until the end of 2001. Since 2002 the choir has been conducted by Prof. Jörg Breiding. The Knabenchor Hanover was among the first choirs to take an interest in historical performance practices and in doing so achieved a quality of musicianship that has since won it acclaim not just in Germany but internationally as well.
The ensemble has traditionally specialized in the vocal works of the seventeenth century composers, its main focus at first having been on the works of Heinrich Schütz. The choir’s five Schütz recordings under Heinz Henning’s baton produced between 1982 and 1999 set new standards for performances of this repertoire. Four of them received the French Critics Award and the “Sacred Choral Music 1648” was awarded with the Deutschen Schalplattenpreis.
World-class musicians such as Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman and Christoph Eschenbach have all worked with the choir, as have such famous orchestras as the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music Berlin and countless German radio orchestras. Besides giving concerts and performing at festivals both in Germany and abroad, the Knabenchor Hanover also records regular and can frequently be heard on the radio. The choir also received the award for classical choral recording of the year at the 2006 ECHO Award for the recent, first publication worldwide of Andreas Hammerschmidt`s “Grant us Peace”. Concert tours have been taking the choir to Israel, Japan, Russia, South and Central America, the USA and South Africa.
The ensemble London Brass
was formed by members of the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble in 1986, with the aim of exploring the virtuosity and rich sonorities presented in chamber music works for brass instruments. Many of the founding members could draw on their longstanding experience with the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, and consequently London Brass soon became a much-sought-after ensemble, known particularly through its concerts and exceptional recordings. Despite taking a new direction by including a jazz trumpet and a jazz trombone in the mid-1990s, the ensemble has always remained true to its roots. Composers such as Django Bates, Mike Gibbs, Mark Anthony Turnage, Michael Nyman, and Richard Rodney Bennett regularly dedicate new works to the ensemble. The musicians’ repertoire spans from the music of the sixteenth century—by Giovanni Gabrieli, for example—to Freddie Mercury, and the ensemble has performed its programmes in venues such as the Lincoln Center New York, at a steel factory in Norway, and under a cluster of trees in the Dolomites. London Brass is a welcome guest at international festivals and concert series. The brass players have appeared, for example, at the BBC Proms in London and at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2002, in honour of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee—a concert that was broadcast on television across the globe. Currently, London Brass is ensemble-in-residence at the Royal College of Music in London.
Jörg Breiding
was born in Hanover in 1972. He received his training in teaching music, singing and German at the University of Music and Drama Hanover. In addition to that he had lessons in choral and orchestral conducting with Professor Gerd Müller-Lorenz (Lübeck) and Professor Heinz Henning (Hanover). After a year spent as an assistant to Professor Heinz Henning, he took over as the conductor of the Knabenchor Hanover in January 2002.
From 1998 to 2005, he taught choral conducting at Lübeck Academy of Music and in April 2005 he was appointed Professor of Choral Conducting/Conducting of Mixed Ensembles at the Folkwang Conservatory in Essen.
Within his concert engagements at national and international festivals, Jörg Breiding worked with famous ensembles like the Baroque Orchestra L` Arco , the Baroque Ensemble Aperto, the Chapel Royal Hanover, the Baroque Orchestra Leipzig, the Johann Rosenmüller Ensemble, members of the NDR-Radio-philharmonic Orchestra and State Orchestra of Lower Saxony. So far several concerts of the Knabenchor Hanover have been recorded and broadcasted by the German radio stations NDR and WDR.
After the recording of Georg Friedrich Handel’s “Messiah” in 2003, the recording of “Grant us peace” by Andreas Hammerschmidt was released two years later. Breiding initiated that those works, which remained unappreciated for 300 years, were put into modern musical notation. They were recorded on CD with the Knabenchor Hanover, the Himmlischen Cantorey and the Johann Rosenmüller Ensemble. This recent, first publication worldwide of “Grant us peace” received the award for classical choral recording of the year at the 2006 ECHO award.
