Moderator
Neil Wallace (UK)
photo: Frank Hanswijk
Neil Wallace was born in Scotland (UK) and lives in the Netherlands since 1995. His career in the performing arts started in Edinburgh, when he worked as actor and composer for the Theatre Workshop and with youth theatre company Brassneck Theatre. He occupied a number of cultural posts in the UK before becoming deputy director of Glasgow’s 1990 Cultural Capital of Europe programme. From 1991 to 1995 he was Programme Director of the multidisciplinary ‘Tramway’ in Glasgow. After moving to the Netherlands, he worked for several years as (artistic) director of the Haarlem Theatre and Concert Hall. He now works as music programmer of De Doelen, the major concert hall of Rotterdam since 2006, a job he combines with the artistic leadership of the International Choir Biennial in Haarlem. In 2007, at the request of the Gergiev Festival, he created a site-specific music theatre piece, Sleeping Without Schumann and has since staged more productions, including Wolfgang Rihm’s Sérapin-Stimme, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
Speakers
photo: Ivan Vinovrski
Karmina Šilec (SI)
Karmina Šilec is the artistic director of Carmina Slovenica and works internationally as conductor and stage director. With her unique concept “Choregie” and its innovative interventions, she brought freshness and originality to the world of vocal music and theatre, has opened wider artistic spaces and set trends worldwide. Her projects are provocative and daring, her ideas break taboos, both those of the society and music. As conductor and stage director she has projects with various companies, opera houses and ensembles worldwide and her productions have been performed on stages and festivals of the highest esteem. Karmina Šilec has received more than 20 international awards at choir competitions, as well as the prestigious ITI – Music Theatre Now award in category Music beyond Opera, the theatre award Golden Mask and the International Robert Edler Prize for Choral Music for her exceptional contribution to the world choir movement. She also works as an artistic adviser for choral music, university professor for conducting, as guest conductor and jury member at festivals and competitions.
Karmina Šilec Website
photo: Leo Samama
Laurent Slaars (FR)
Laurent Slaars graduated from the Sorbonne University of Paris (History and Economics) while studying singing at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris with Rachel Yakar and William Christie. As a profesional solo singer since 1990, he has performed and recorded extensively in the fields of baroque and XXth Century music with such conductors as William Christie, Christophe Rousset Jean-Claude Malgoire, Laurence Equilbey or Jonathan Nott, also giving first performances of pieces by Iannis Xenakis, Paul Mafano, Hans Peter Kyburtz, Bruno Mantovani…. As a musicologist, he writes extensively about composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Busoni, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Reger, Kodály, Schubert, Prokofiev… At the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet, he has worked as a program note writer since 1996, and from 2003 to 2006 as a pre-concert lecturer. He also appears as a guest musicologist at the Radio-Télévision Suisse (Espace2).
He is the French translator of American music critic & writer Alex Ross (The Rest is Noise, Listen to This). He has also translated and updated Harry Haskell’s landmark book The Early Music Revival : A History [Les voies d’un renouveau : la musique ancienne et son interprétation, de Mendelssohn à nos jours ; Actes Sud, 2013].
Laurent Slaars’ blog