Andreas Ottensamer

The protagonist of the March edition of the Stars with the Sinfonietta series will be Andreas Ottensamer – clarinettist, artistic director and conductor – artist who delights both audiences and critics with his versatility. On stage the orchestra and its conductor will be accompanied by French horn player Paolo Mandes who will perform Mozart’s virtuoso Horn Concerto. Alongside Antonín Dvořák’s classic Serenade for Strings, the programme will include Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra by Arthur Honegger, a 20th-century Swiss composer.

Andreas Ottensamer was born in 1989 in Vienna. He comes from an Austro-Hungarian musical family. Andreas became interested in music very early, and he took first piano lessons at the age of four. When he was ten, he started learning to play cello at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and then in 2003 his interest moved to clarinet. In 2009 he paused his BA studies at Harvard to pursue the scholarship of the Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ottensamer studied conducting under Professor Nicolas Pasquet (Weimar) and Professor Johannes Schlaefli (Zurich), and participated in masterclasses conducted by Maestri Riccardo Muti and Jaap van Zweden. Since March 2011 he is the principal clarinettist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Ottensamer is the artistic director of the Bürgenstock Festical in Switzerland. His artistic partnerships as a chamber musician include collaborations with Yuja Wang, Seong-Jin Cho, Lisa Batiashvili, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Phillippe Jaroussky, Gautier Capuçon and Sol Gabetta. His conducting career started in 2020, and since then he took on that role four times, in North America, Europe and the Far East.