ABOUT
"What is most captivating is the expressiveness of her playing and her impressive presence, which makes her the self-evident center of the action; she lives "her" music. "Her" is intentionally chosen because she makes the music entirely her own. She never delivers, but brings to life. Stylistically she is absolutely confident; her personal cadenza in the Mozart concerto and her sovereign conducting from the piano clearly prove that."
(Valérie Groß, Deutsche Grammophon - jury's verdict on the occasion of the awarding of the Maria-Ladenburger-Förderpreis 2020)
26-year-old conductor and pianist Anna Handler is currently studying orchestral conducting at the Juilliard School in New York. Her studies were made possible by the Juilliard Kovner Fellowship for outstanding students of classical music, which she was the first female conductor ever to receive.
She has already worked with renowned conductors and major orchestras as an assistant. She assisted Kirill Petrenko and conducted the incidental music for the concert opera production "Mazeppa" with the Berliner Philharmoniker. She was also Daniel Harding's assistant with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester at "Klassik am Odeonsplatz" in Munich. At the Bayerische Staatsoper, she assisted Oksana Lyniv with the opera productions "Mauerschau" and "Greek" and, at the age of 23, took over the musical direction of the production "Eva and Adam", which premiered as part of the 2019 Munich Opera Festival.
In the summer of 2022, Anna made her debut at the Salzburg Festival, leading the Káťa Kabanová Opera Camp, and was promptly invited back for a new project in the summer of 2023. She is the founder and director of Enigma Classica – an ensemble with which she performs regularly, most recently at the Festival Junger Künstler in Bayreuth in August 2022. There, together with her team, she presented an interdisciplinary project on music education, exploring the "primordial beings of music" of rhythm, harmony and melody with the help of video animation in real time. The soloists she has worked with include world-renowned names including Arabella Steinbacher and Sabine Meyer. In December 2022, she will conduct the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in a children's concert featuring Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "The Snowman".
A prizewinner of the International Hans von Bulow Competition, she made her debut with the Meininger Hofkapelle in 2018. She was awarded the Maria-Ladenburger-Förderpreis for music in the chamber music hall of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, in cooperation with the WDR, the Cusanuswerk Foundation and Deutsche Grammophon. She also received the Rising Star Award from the Initiativkreis Mönchengladbach and the European Cultural Foundation Europamusicale. Together with her sister, violinist Laura Handler, she performs in a successful duo.
Anna Handler was born in 1996, has German-Colombian roots and grew up in Munich. As a pianist, she studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, among other places. She studied orchestral conducting with Nicolás Pasquet and Ekhart Wycik at the Hochschule für Musik "Franz Liszt" Weimar, graduating in July 2021, and is now completing her Master's degree in this subject at the Juilliard School in New York in the class of David Robertson.
Anna Handler has been supported by the KD SCHMID Fellowship Scheme since October 2022.
"Anyone who wants to observe what is possible in terms of direct communication between an orchestra and its conductor must hear the Ensemble Enigma Classica under its founder Anna Handler. Every encouraging smile, every sharp look, every stimulating gesture leads to an immediately audible consequence in the excellent young musicians, who pay attention to their conductor as if hypnotized. But the Munich native, not yet in her mid-twenties, is infinitely more than a motivational coach: her conducting technique is impeccable." Michael Bastian Weiß, Abendzeitung München, 21.20.2020
Pressarticle:
CONCERTS
The trilogy that started with NOAH and continued with MOSES now proceeds with a project series that tackles religious thematic stories. For the third part of the cooperation with young people that have fled to or are native to Munich we go back to the origins of human history. In the creation myth a world view is constructed, in which an Almighty Father creates a man as the first human and from his ribs creates a woman for him, who is responsible for the subsequent expulsion from paradise. This Christian story-telling tradition struggles here with the Jewish and Islamic way of representing our origin. Beginning with biographies of young people searching for their place in the world, EVA UND ADAM asks the question about a new start in a strange world and the possibility of an emancipated co-habitation, not just for the two genders, but also for different religious communities. The musical theatre project combines music and arrangements from Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung with new compositions and musical ideas of the young people.
The trilogy that started with NOAH and continued with MOSES now proceeds with a project series that tackles religious thematic stories. For the third part of the cooperation with young people that have fled to or are native to Munich we go back to the origins of human history. In the creation myth a world view is constructed, in which an Almighty Father creates a man as the first human and from his ribs creates a woman for him, who is responsible for the subsequent expulsion from paradise. This Christian story-telling tradition struggles here with the Jewish and Islamic way of representing our origin. Beginning with biographies of young people searching for their place in the world, EVA UND ADAM asks the question about a new start in a strange world and the possibility of an emancipated co-habitation, not just for the two genders, but also for different religious communities. The musical theatre project combines music and arrangements from Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung with new compositions and musical ideas of the young people.
The trilogy that started with NOAH and continued with MOSES now proceeds with a project series that tackles religious thematic stories. For the third part of the cooperation with young people that have fled to or are native to Munich we go back to the origins of human history. In the creation myth a world view is constructed, in which an Almighty Father creates a man as the first human and from his ribs creates a woman for him, who is responsible for the subsequent expulsion from paradise. This Christian story-telling tradition struggles here with the Jewish and Islamic way of representing our origin. Beginning with biographies of young people searching for their place in the world, EVA UND ADAM asks the question about a new start in a strange world and the possibility of an emancipated co-habitation, not just for the two genders, but also for different religious communities. The musical theatre project combines music and arrangements from Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung with new compositions and musical ideas of the young people.
The trilogy that started with NOAH and continued with MOSES now proceeds with a project series that tackles religious thematic stories. For the third part of the cooperation with young people that have fled to or are native to Munich we go back to the origins of human history. In the creation myth a world view is constructed, in which an Almighty Father creates a man as the first human and from his ribs creates a woman for him, who is responsible for the subsequent expulsion from paradise. This Christian story-telling tradition struggles here with the Jewish and Islamic way of representing our origin. Beginning with biographies of young people searching for their place in the world, EVA UND ADAM asks the question about a new start in a strange world and the possibility of an emancipated co-habitation, not just for the two genders, but also for different religious communities. The musical theatre project combines music and arrangements from Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung with new compositions and musical ideas of the young people.
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Akademisches Orchester der TU Ilmenau e.V.
Laura Handler, Solovioline
Anna Handler, Leitung
R.Schumann: Ouvertüre, Scherzo und Finale Op. 52
H.Wieniawski: Fantasie brilliante für Solovioline und Orchester Op. 20
J.Haydn: Sinfonie Nr. 104 in D-Dur
