Gerd Albrecht
Gerd Albrecht ( born July 19, 1935 in Essen, † February 2nd, 2014 in Berlin) was a German conductor.
Life
Gerd Albrecht in 1935 in Essen, the son of the musicologist Hans Albrecht ( 1902-1961 ) and a pianist born. After years of study in Kiel and Hamburg with Wilhelm Brückner - Rüggeberg Gerd Albrecht won as a 22 -year-old first prize at the International Conducting Competition in Besancon. He opted not for the rapid career, but began in 1958 as an assistant at the Stuttgart Opera. In 1961 he was first Kapellmeister but already in Mainz and in 1963 the youngest Music Director ( GMD) of Germany in Lübeck. In 1966, he spent six years as a GMD to Kassel and led an explanatory concerts for children and young people. He took over in 1972 as Resident Conductor of the musical overall management of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. 1975 to 1980 he headed the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, after which he worked for eight years free in the major music centers of the world.
1988-1997 Albrecht was music director of the Hamburg State Opera and State Philharmonic Orchestra in Hamburg. From 1993 to 1996 he was the first foreigner chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in Prague, where there was considerable tension. In 1998, he led the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra Copenhagen. He also directed the National Youth Orchestra.
Albrecht's focus was on the music of the Romantic period. Many of his numerous CD recordings have won awards. In addition, he became deeply, even on television with his lecture concerts, New Music a. In his time in Hamburg, but often not with him as conductor, music of Wolfgang Fortner, György Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann and Hans Werner Henze were premiered, also Alfred Schnittke's Historia von D. Johannes Faustus, Alexander Zemlinsky's Der König Kandaules, Rolf Liebermann's acquittal of Medea and Helmut Lachenmann girl with the matches. Commissioned works he forgave among others, Krzysztof Penderecki. He led works of Hans Krasa, Viktor Ullmann and Erwin Schulhoff, which had been outlawed by the Nazis and invited Robert Wilson one to stage Wagner's Parsifal in Hamburg.
Albrecht sat very committed young people for the music to inspire; explained in numerous television shows, and he conducted before a youthful audience. In 1974 he received the Adolf Grimme Prize. In the series "Classics for Kids" he told children classical works such as The Moldau, Peter and the Wolf and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
In 1989, Albrecht Music Foundation and the Hamburg Youth Sounding museums in Hamburg and Berlin. In 1984 he was awarded the German Critics Prize. Albrecht was since 1994 a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg. He died in February 2014 after a long illness.
Awards
- 2001: Large Silver Medal for Services to the Republic of Austria
- 2002: Gold Medal for Service to the City of Vienna
- 2008: Paul Hindemith Prize of the city of Hanau.