Album presentation of Mr Handel’s Dinner
“With his exuberant technical differentiation and, above all, his expressive diction, Steger was able to ignite flights of fancy, sometimes touching and warm, sometimes virtuosic with bravura, with recorders in various registers.”
That he is dubbed the “Paganini” and “magician of the recorder” or “the world’s leading recorder player” is not surprising. In order to live up to such high expectations, one requires not only astonishing technique, but also charisma, intellect and a special sensitivity for the music. Maurice Steger has been proving all of this to his audiences, inspiring with his intense tone and unstoppable energy in various concert formats all over the world.
As a soloist, conductor or both at once, he regularly performs with the top period instrument ensembles, such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, La Cetra Basel, Venice Baroque Orchestra, The English Concert, Il Pomo D’oro, and I Barocchisti. He also performs with leading modern orchestras such as the Zürich Chamber Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Musikkollegium Winterthur, or the NDR Radiophilharmonie.
Chamber music plays a notable role in the richly varied spectrum of Maurice Steger’s artistic endeavors. With fellow musicians and friends such as Hille Perl, Avi Avital, Daniele Caminiti, Lee Santana, Naoki Kitaya, Mauro Valli, Sebastian Wienand, Sol Gabetta or the French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, he dedicates himself to a continuously updated repertoire of Early Music. Besides this, Maurice Steger also engages with new concert formats and contemporary compositions, as shown in projects with pianist Martin Stadtfeld or the Kuss Quartet. In 2021 Steger premiered three new pieces: A dining experience with Telemann by Johannes Fischer, Sei gutes Muts by Iris ter Schiphorst with the Kuss Quartet as well as the Sinonietta per archi by Massimiliano Matesic.
Maurice Steger loves the interaction between different cultures and getting to know other ways of working and interpretive approaches, working as a concert artist, teacher and juror, not only in Europe but throughout the world. He’s led tours of Asia and Australia with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Violins du Roy from Canada and the Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. He was the first recorder player from the West to perform with the Traditional Taipei Chinese Orchestra.
His commitment to musical education is also extremely important to him: besides the directorship of the Gstaad Baroque Academy at the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, which he took over in 2013 in addition to diverse master classes, he invented the character of Tino Flautino in order to encourage young children to playfully engage with classical music. Tino Flautino’s newest adventure with his tomcat Leo will be presented in German, Swiss-German and Italian.
Through his own unending thirst for knowledge, he succeeds time and again to show how much there is still to be discovered about Baroque music. For example, on his recording Souvenirs, he presented works that he discovered in the private library of Count Harrach in Naples. His album Baroque Twitter with the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the singer Nuria Rial was inspired by birdsong. Mr. Handel’s Dinner with La Cetra Barockorchester Basel was released in the spring of 2019 and reflects on Handel’s opera performances and especially their intermissions in London. In September 2023, Steger’s very personal Tribute to Bach, also recorded with La Cetra Barockorchester Basel, was released on Berlin Classics.
One wonders sometimes, where Maurice Steger gets all this energy with which he has helped the recorder to make a comeback, as Arte recently presented in a documentary The Recorder: A Comeback. But when you see how much love for the instrument, the music and the audience he puts into each of his many projects, it becomes clear: Maurice Steger is also carved out of very special wood.
2023/2024
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