Hartmut Rohde is one of the leading and most sought-after European violists, renowned for his stylistic versatility and rhetorical perceptiveness. New perspectives and experiences in musical dialogue serve as the basis of his interpretations. Following successful performances of concertos by Walton, Hindemith, Mozart and an arrangement of the Cello Concerto in E Minor by Edward Elgar for viola, the premiere of Gehra’s viola concerto with Reinhard Goebel proved to be an undertaking of utmost importance in recent years. Hummel’s Fantasie and the enthralling Andante and Hungarian Rondo by Carl Maria von Weber also resounded in the Düsseldorf Tonhalle.
As a chamber musician, Hartmut Rohde regularly performs in Australia, the USA, Canada, South America, Israel, Europe and Switzerland. Numerous awards from competitions form the basis for his international concert activity, both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. Rohde’s chamber music partners include Heinrich Schiff, David Geringas, Lars Vogt, Daniel Hope, Janine Jansen, Arto Noras, Patrick Gallois, and Jörg Widmann, as well as the Auryn Quartet and the Artis Quartet, among others. He is also a founding member of the Mozart Piano Quartet, which is one of the world’s leading piano chamber music ensembles. The quartet received the newly created OPUS Klassik Award in October 2018. They toured Asia, South America and the USA from 2019-2021, appearing in the regions’ most important music centres.
Rohde performs as a soloist with conductors such as Kent Nagano, Pavel Baleff, Werner Stiefel, Paavo Järvi, Massimo Zanetti, Christoph Prick and Michael Sanderling. In addition, he is a regular guest artist at Carnegie Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the “Tensions” Heimbach, the Festival Pablo Casals, Moritzburg Festival, Bantry West Cork Music Festival, Australian Chamber Music Festival and the Kumho Asiana Festival in Seoul. His commitment to contemporary music is evident in his collaborations with composers such as Jörg Widmann, Detlev Glanert, Brett Dean, Wolfgang Rihm, Krzystof Penderecki, and Garth Knox, as well as David Philipp Hefti, Sören Nils Eichberg, and Arvydas Malcys.
From 2013-2017 Rohde was the conductor and artistic director of the Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra Wroclaw. Further conducting work has taken him to the Biel Symphony Orchestra, Lemberg Symphony Orchestra, Cervo Summer Academy, Aurora Chamber Orchestra Sweden, and the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra. He has given guest concerts in the Berlin Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, at the Wratislawia Cantans Festival, and at the Casals Festival in France. With the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra Budapest and the Hamburg Camerata, he conducted concerts in 2019 in the Konzerthaus Vienna and the Hamburg Musikhalle, among other renowned venues. In November 2019, Rohde conducted Beethoven’s Second Symphony and Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture with the Orquestra Filharmonica Projeto in Sao Paulo.
Rohde has been a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts since 1993, and is also an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. His students have gone on to successful careers that include leading positions with the Berlin and Munich Philharmonic Orchestras, with many radio orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, as well as playing in London, Paris, Rome, and other such cities, winning numerous prizes in competitions, including the Banff International String Quartet Competition, ARD Munich, Young Concert Artists NY, Mendelssohn Competition, Brahms Competition, and Geneva Competition, with his students also being winners of the ECHO Klassik Prize. Among other positions, Hartmut Rohde is currently the artistic director of the International Max Rostal Competition, held in Berlin.
