the newly appointed professors Henja Semmler (violin) and Simone von Rahden (string chamber music)
Works by Bohuslav Martinů, Gabriel Fauré and others with Antoaneta Emanuilova (violoncello) and Jonathan Aner (piano) from the Oberon Trio
Violinist Henja Semmler succeeds Professor Christiane Hutcap and takes over the violin department at the Institute of Music. She studied violin at universities in Freiburg, Vienna, Lübeck and Cologne. She studied viola as a subsidiary subject. She went on to study baroque violin and chamber music in Berlin. She has taught at the Mahler Academy in Bolzano, at music academies in the Ukraine, Vienna and St. Petersburg. She has won several international prizes, performed as a soloist with renowned orchestras and founded the Oberon Trio.
Born in Karlsruhe, Simone von Rahden enjoys a varied career as a chamber musician, soloist, orchestral musician and teacher.
Her first engagements took her to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra while she was still a student; she has been a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe since 2009 and the Spira mirabilis project since 2007, and was also principal violist in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from 2016-2021. Simone von Rahden has performed as a soloist with renowned orchestras; as a chamber musician she appears regularly throughout Europe, in recent years also increasingly with ensembles on historical instruments such as the Quartetto Bernardini and her string quintet "Spunicunifait".
Simone von Rahden has been a lecturer for viola at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin since 2014 and has also taught viola, orchestral studies, literature studies and chamber music at the hmt Rostock since October 2020 until she took over the professorship for string chamber music in October 2023.
