Programme

Music by Manuel De Falla, Modest Mussorgsky, W.A. Mozart and Domenico Scarlatti in versions for one and two guitars

The evocative, ghostly world in Manuel de Falla’s ballet ‘The Magic of Love’ could not sound more Spanish than in the version for two guitars, harpsichord sonatas by Scarlatti could not be more nuanced and colourful than in the artistic versions for solo guitar by Prof. Michael Hampel, and Phileas Baun shows with movements from Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ how virtuoso, spectacular and above all expressive a solo guitar can sound. Rarely does an audience experience the guitar in so many facets within a single concert.

Michael Hampel and Phileas Baun both teach at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg. Both are successful soloists and chamber musicians and have made a name for themselves with unusual and award-winning concert formats. Michael Hampel and Phileas Baun teach guitar at the University of Music in Freiburg. Both are successful soloists and experienced chamber musicians in a wide variety of constellations, often with unusual, award-winning concert formats.

Michael Hampel is Professor of Guitar at the Freiburg/Breisgau University of Music. Prior to this, he taught at the Trossingen University of Music from 1994 and most recently worked as head of the university. After his studies in Frankfurt/M, Trossingen and Salzburg, he began an international concert career. Tours have taken him regularly to Asia and South America, among other places, with many recordings and live broadcasts.

From 2017 to 2019, he was a visiting professor at Tongji University in Shanghai. In addition to teaching at the Freiburg University of Applied Sciences, his artistic work in recent years has focussed on developing new concert formats incorporating digital and scenic concepts.

Phileas Baun studied guitar, conducting and early music in The Hague, Trossingen and Basel and is at home with his own projects and world premieres in contemporary and experimental music as well as on the classical concert stage. He has won numerous competitions and has been teaching ‘Guitar Extended Competence Spectrum’ at the University of Music in Freiburg since 2021.

Previous projects include co-productions with IRCAM Paris, world premieres at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2018 and world premieres at the Crossroads Festival Salzburg 2019. In 2024, he won the most important Swiss live event prize ‘Xaver’ for his performance at the opening show of the national hockey final in the stadium in Fribourg/CH, broadcast live on Swiss television SRF.