About

From early on he specialized in not specializing: Sebastian Gottschick, born into a family of church
musicians in Düsseldorf, studied conducting, composition, and violin in Berlin,
Hamburg, and at the Juilliard School in New York. He is at home in contemporary
music as well as in early music, active as a conductor and composer/ arranger, as
violinist/ violist and teacher.

He came to the Ensemble Oriol Berlin as concertmaster in 1989, before he took over
as Artistic Director in 1993. Stylistic diversity was the concept of the ensemble; it
performed music of all epochs from early baroque to world premieres, with soloists
such as Christian Tetzlaff, Andreas Staier, Anatol Ugorsky, Anner Bylsma, Christine
Schäfer, Markus Stockhausen, Petra Müllejans, Bernhard Forck and many others.

Also an avid conductor of operas, Gottschick was Musical Director of the Neue
Opernbühne Berlin from 1994 through 2003. He was a guest at the Berliner
Kammeroper, the Hans-Otto-Theater Potsdam, Theater Basel, Teatro La Fenice
Venedig, Teatro Sao Carlos Lissabon, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Staatstheater
Saarbrücken and KonzertTheater Bern. He conducted the premieres of Christoph
Coburger’s Null Tote in Bochum, Mela Meierhans’ Tante Hänsi in Basel, Daniel
Fueter’s Forelle Stanley und Daniel Mouthon’s LCD in Zürich. In 2005 he was
named Musical Director of the ensemble für städtebewohner wien/ berlin, which is
dedicated to new forms of music theater.

As conductor he worked together with orchestras such as the Kammerakademie
Potsdam, the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, radio orchestras in Frankfurt, Warszaw,
Berlin, Stuttgart and München, or ensembles such as the Klangforum Vienna, the
MusikFabrik Köln, Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Camerata Variabile, ensemble united
berlin and ensemble ö!, among others. Since 2004 he is a regular guest with the
 ensemble für neue musik zürich, for whom he wrote his Partita (2008), „Whispers of
Heavenly Death“ (2009) and, with Christoph Coburger, „Memento mori“ (2011) and
„ZUHOEAN“ (2015). The CD „Notturni“ with Gottschick‘s chamber music was
released recently by HatHut. Two CDs with his adaptions of songs and chamber
music by Charles Ives (also Hat Hut) received international critical acclaim.
Arrangements of works by Enescu, Milhaud and Copland for the  Alliage-
Quintett  (Sony) were awarded an Echo Classic in 2008. He also arranged
Strawinsky‘s „Firebird“ for the Alliage-Quintett with clarinet soloist Sabine Meyer
(published with Schott and on the CD „Fantasia“ ,Sony), and Ravel’s “La Valse”; with
Alban Gerhardt, de Falla’s „Siete Canciones Populares“ (CD „Fantasy in Blue“,
Hyperion). The Signum Saxophone Quartet recently and Ksenia Sidorova (accordion)
recently premiered Strawinskys „Petrouchka“.

As violinist and violist Gottschick is a dedicated chamber musician. In 1994 he
founded the Manon Quartet Berlin together with violinists Ariadne Daskalakis and
Bernhard Forck and cellist Anna Carewe. They were Quartet in residence at the
Tanglewood Festival in 1996 where they worked with the legendary Eugene Lehner,
violist of the Kolisch Quartet. Together with his wife, the violinist Ariadne Daskalakis,
he founded the chamber music festival Music fom Land’s End Wareham in
Massachusetts in 2012. Both musicians are also members of the Portland Bach
Virtuosi.