Conductor, lutenist, harpist, arranger and composer
With L'Arpeggiata, baroque arrives directly in the 21st century: fine, cultivated, noble, lustful, spirited, fast-paced! A vital look back to the future.
The Austrian conductor Christina Pluhar is one of the most innovative musicians on the early music scene.
With her irrepressible passion for making music, she won the ECHO Klassik in 2009, 2010 and 2011. In 2018, Opus Klassik named the ensemble L'Arpeggiata "Ensemble of the Year". Critics rave about the liberated, spontaneous and highly virtuoso way in which the instrumentalists and singers under Pluhar's direction breathe new life into the selected works, how they are able to coax sounds from them that had never been heard in such colorfulness before.
Christina Pluhar's CDs and concerts are enchanting and her interpretations, arrangements and musical discoveries shape the early music world of today.
The music world has a lot to thank Christina Pluhar for - both the early music scene and the concert life of the 21st century as a whole. With the founding of her ensemble L'Arpeggiata in 2000, the conductor, lutenist, harpist, arranger and composer managed to break down the firmly held structures of interpreting and understanding early music and to renew the perspective. Through her approach, Christina Pluhar opened up baroque music to an unexpectedly broad audience.
Christina Pluhar was born in Graz in 1965. She studied concert guitar in her home town and began studying lute at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 1984, where she graduated in 1987. She continued her studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with Hopkinson Smith and obtained her diploma in early music in 1992. She studied baroque harp in Basel and at the Scuola Civica in Milan.
Since 1992 she has lived as a freelance musician in her adopted home of Paris. She has performed as a soloist and basso continuo player with numerous ensembles such as La Fenice, Hesperion XXI, Il Giardino Armonico, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Concerto Soave, and many others.
From 1997 to 2005 she worked as an assistant to Ivor Bolton at the Munich State Opera, the Opéra Garnier in Paris, the Hamburg Opera, and the Maggio Musicale in Florence, among others.
By founding L’Arpeggiata in 2000, Pluhar breathed new life into the revolutionary spirit of the early music scene: instead of interpretive routine, she focused from the beginning on experimental, liberated and improvisational interplay. She broke with routine basso continuo playing, arranged well-known and unknown works and gave the music of the 17th century a new color.
The absolute masters of their craft appear on stage at L’Arpeggiata. Christina Pluhar selects her fellow musicians and guests with the utmost care, just as she selects the repertoire. Her guests include not only stars from the field of historical performance practice, but also from jazz and traditional music.
L’Arpeggiata has since played to sold-out crowds on all international stages. The CD recordings have been praised by audiences and the press and have won numerous awards. Concert tours have taken the ensemble throughout Europe, Australia, South America, Japan, China, New Zealand and the USA.
In 2012, L’Arpeggiata was the first early music ensemble ever to be “ensemble in residence” at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Since the founding of her ensemble L’Arpeggiata, 18 successful albums have been released. In her CD projects, Christina Pluhar and her musicians devote themselves to an experimental style and speak the strict language of historically informed performance practice with equal virtuosity. They always approach the work in all its facets at the very highest interpretive and musical level.
L’Arpeggiata’s CD recordings on the Alpha, Naïve and Erato/Warner Classics labels are not only bestsellers but have also won numerous awards such as the Echo Klassik, Edison Prize, VSCD Muziekprijs, Cannes Classical Awards, Timbre de platine d‘Opéra international, BBC Magazine, Prix Exellentia Pizzicato, ffff Télérama, Coup de cœur de l’Académie Charles Cros and many others.
The film Tous les soleils, directed by the writer Philippe Claudel, which was released on the big screen in March 2011, was inspired by the music of their legendary album La Tarantella. Two tracks from this album were re-recorded for the occasion with the voice of the lead actor Stefano Accorsi.
Christina Pluhar has also enjoyed great success as an opera conductor. As in her work as director of L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar explores new paths in the interpretation of operas and looks at the compositions not only from the perspective of the musical director, but always has the entire performance in mind. Her opera performances are always extraordinary, revolutionary and real crowd pullers, as her arrangements and the conscious historical contextualization of the interpretations broaden the horizon enormously. To date, Christina Pluhar has arranged, adapted and interpreted numerous baroque operas with L’Arpeggiata, both staged and in concert.
In 2005, she recorded Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s work Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo and revolutionized the understanding of recitar cantando with her recording.
Between 2009 and 2012 she performed Luigi Rossi's opera Il Palazzo Incantato (excerpts) together with the Sicilian puppeteer Mimmo Cutticcio, among others in the baroque palace theater in Ludwigsburg.
In 2011 Christina Pluhar shone at the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival and the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music with Giovanni Andrea Bontempi's opera Il Paride (1662) in a production by Christoph von Bernuth.
In 2014 she received a commission to compose from the Teatro Mayor in Bogotá, Colombia, where she performed her cross opera Orfeo Chamán in a production by Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden. The opera was released on CD and DVD by Erato/Warner Classics in 2016.
In 2017, she created - together with the choreographer Mei Hong Lin - the acclaimed dance piece Music & dance for a while at the Landestheater Linz, which was awarded the Austrian Music Theater Prize.
Between 2016 and 2021, she conducted Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo several times with Claudio Rolando Villazón in the title role.
In 2019, she conducted the stage premiere of Georg Caspar Schürmann's opera "Die getreue Alceste" (1719) in a production by Jan Eßinger at the Rococo Theater Schwetzingen.
In January 2022, she will perform Mozart's Il Re Pastore in concert at the Mozart Festival Salzburg.
A new staged production with Handel's Belshazzar is planned for 2023 at the Theater an der Wien in a production by Marie-Eve Signeyrole.
She has been teaching baroque harp at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (NL) since 1999.
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Photo (c) Michal Nowak
