Nicolas Altstaedt

Born in 1982 of German-French parents, Nicolas Altstaedt was one of the last pupils of Boris Pergamenshikov at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin. Altstaedt completed his studies with Eberhard Feltz.
After winning many prizes at international music competitions, in 2009 he was awarded a fellowship of the Borletti Buitoni Foundation and the 2010 Dortmund Cultural Foundation Prize. Nicolas Altstaedt was also named the winner of the 2010 Credit Suisse Young Artist Award at Vienna’s Musikverein, which included a debut performance at the 2010 Lucerne Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic directed by Gustavo Dudamel. Shortly afterwards he was named to the BBC New Generation Artist Programme which includes performances and recordings with all the BBC orchestras, chamber music recitals and appearances at the Proms and in Wigmore Hall. At the suggestion of Gidon Kremer, in 2011 he was named Artistic Director of the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival which was held under his auspices in 2012 for the first time. As part of the festival, he performed programs with a variety of ensembles given at venues such as the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, and Concertgebouw Amsterdam.
The high points of past and forthcoming seasons include performances with Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony , the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, Japan Century Orchestra and the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Helsinki, under the baton of conductors such as Sir Neville Marriner, Sir Roger Norrington, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Andreas Marcon a.o. In the 2013/2014 he will also be Artist-in-Residence with the Scharoun Ensemble at the Zermatt Festival as well as perform as as a guest artist with the Austrio-Hungarian Haydn Philharmonic and Musikkollegium Winterthur (2014/2015).
He champions the work of living composers and has given performances of works by composers such as Thomas Ades, Jörg Widmann, Matthias Pintscher, Sofia Gubaidulina, Moritz Eggert, Fazil Say, and HK Gruber. In 2006 he gave the Swiss premiere performance of the cello concerto by Georg Friedrich Haas with the Basle Symphony Orchestra and to mark the composer’s 85th birthday in 2012 he performed the double concerto by György Kurtág in Budapest as well as performing “Temptation” to mark the 60th birthday of composer Wolfgang Rihm. In 2014 he will give the first German performance of the cello concerto by Nico Muhly in Frankfurt am Main. Works dedicated to him by Thomas Larcher, Raphael Merlin, and Fazil Say were given their premiere performances in 2012 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, among other venues. He regularly performs chamber music programs with Alexander Lonquich, Pekka Kuusisto, Barnabás Kelemen, Jonathan Cohen, Antoine Tamestit and Quatuor Ebène and is a guest artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His recording of Schumann’s cello concerto (with the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz) and the Haydn cello concertos (with the Kammerakademie Potsdam) as well as the recently released world premiere recording of works for cello and piano by Wilhelm Killmayer (with José Gallardo) attracted considerable attention and high praise from international record critics. His recording of the Bach viola da gamba sonatas with Jonathan Cohen will be released in 2013.

The artist's homepage:

http://www.nicolasaltstaedt.com/