Konstantia Gourzi

Konstantia Gourzi is both a composer and conductor, and she has said she finds those two activities inseparable in her music-making. Gourzi is also an important educator, and wherever she has taught, she has established new ensembles devoted to contemporary music. Gourzi was born in Athens in 1962 and began piano lessons at the age of seven. She entered the Athens Conservatoire at 13, studying piano, composition, and conducting. In 1987, she moved to the Hochschule für Künste in Berlin, where she continued both the composition and conducting strains of her education, with prestigious teachers on both sides; her composition instructors included Diether de la Motte (a special mentor), Wolfgang Rihm, and Hans Werner Henze, while she took conducting instruction with the likes of Giuseppe Sinopoli, Bernard Haitink, and Carlo Maria Giulini. Gourzi served as Claudio Abbado's assistant at the Berlin Philharmonic from 1988 to 1992, and in the mid-1990s, she undertook further composition studies with György Kurtág. Several awards and scholarships, including second prize at the 1995 International Competition for Conductors of Contemporary Music in Paris, broadened her visibility. Gourzi's music falls mostly into the orchestral, chamber, and choral genres. Her commissions include those from the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the Bamberg Symphony, and the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Some combine modern compositional devices with musical or pictorial influences from her native Greece. She has conducted her own works, including the orchestral Mykene (2002) with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and she has also conducted such ensembles as the Deutsche Radiophilharmonie Saarbrücken, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, and the Young Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. After teaching for a time at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin, she joined the faculty at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München in 2002, where she has remained ever since. At each stop on her career, Gourzi has founded a new ensemble specializing in contemporary works. In 1991, she established attacca berlin, directing it until 1996, and from 1999 to 2007, she was the artistic director of ensemble echo at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. In Munich, she founded ensemble oktopus für musik der moderne, which she has continued to conduct. Gourzi has been heard on recordings both as a conductor, leading the ensemble opus21musikplus in a performance of a jazz rendering of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and several times as a composer. In 2021, the ECM label released the album Anájikon, devoted entirely to Gourzi's works.
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