Album presentation of Mr Handel’s Dinner
"Maurice Steger, who conducted the whole thing musically, merging his inimitable virtuoso recorder playing with inspired dance-like conducting, created something unique, and the entire ensemble swayed along as if in a trance."
Steger is dubbed the "Paganini" and "magician of the recorder" or "the world’s leading recorder player". In order to live up to such high expectations, one requires not only astonishing technique, but also charisma, intellect and a special sensitivity for 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 Barockorchester Basel, Venice Baroque Orchestra, The English Concert, Il Pomo D’oro, and I Barocchisti. He also performs with leading modern orchestras such as the Zurich 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 several new pieces, one by Iris ter Schiphorst amongst others.
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 has toured Asia as well as Australia with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Violons du Roy from Canada and the Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. He was also the first recorder player from the West to perform with the Traditional Taipei Chinese Orchestra.
His commitment to musical education is also highly 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.
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 reflects on Handel's opera performances in London and especially their intermissions. In autumn 2023, Steger's very personal Tribute to Bach, also recorded with La Cetra, was released with Berlin Classics.
One wonders sometimes, where Maurice Steger gets all this energy that helped him support the comeback of the recorder, as Arte 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.
2024/2025
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