Gerd Schaller

Career

Schaller studied music at the Würzburg College of Music, and medicine at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. He took up his first post at the Hanover Staatsoper in 1993. In 1998 he became principal conductor at the Braunschweig Staatstheater, and was General Music Director at the Magdeburg Opera from 2003 to 2006. Since 2006, he has worked freelance as a guest conductor with numerous orchestras, primarily in Germany, but also in the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania. Schaller's repertoire includes conducting German and Italian works, including those of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Giuseppe Verdi.

In 1990, Schaller established the Ebrach Summer Music Festival in Franconia, and he remains its Artistic Director. The event is staged in collaboration with BR's Studio Franken.

In 2008, Schaller founded the Philharmonie Festiva. Its core of Munich Bach Soloists has been expanded with musicians from across Germany.

In 2016, Gerd Schaller was unanimously selected by the Bruckner Society of America as the recipient of its Julio Kilenyi Medal of Honor.

Bruckner's Symphonies

Schaller is noted for his recordings of all of Anton Bruckner's symphonies, including versions never recorded before, for the Profil label of Edition Günter Hänssler. The recordings have been praised by Ken Ward, editor of The Bruckner Journal, as "a little musical miracle." Music critic David Hurwitz asserts Schaller "really is an excellent Bruckner conductor", and in reviewing Schaller's recording of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony, he states that Schaller, "doesn't put a foot wrong." AllMusic, reviewing a recording of Bruckner's Fourth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, notes, "The live performances of all three symphonies by Gerd Schaller and the Philharmonie Festiva are first-rate, with great attention to detail and controlled pacing that give the music propulsive movement and coherence." The same recording of the Fourth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies was selected by Stereophile magazine in November 2011 as its "Recording of the Month".

Schaller’s completion of Bruckner's Ninth (2016)

With the final movement of Bruckner's Ninth being a notable unfinished work, Schaller has composed his own completion of the Symphony, closely based on Bruckner's notes, taking into account all available draft materials as far back as the earliest sketches, to close the remaining gaps in the score as much as possible, using original manuscript documents of Bruckner’s, and running to 736 bars. Additionally, Schaller was able to supplement archival and manuscript material with missing elements in the score by drawing on his experience as a conductor, and of applying Bruckner’s compositional techniques to the recordings of the complete cycle of all the composer’s eleven symphonies; so that even passages without continuous original material are in a recognisably Brucknerian style. Schaller first performed his version of the finale with the Philharmonie Festiva in the abbey church at Ebrach on July 24, 2016, as part of the Ebrach Summer Music Festival. Reviewing the double-CD recording of the performance, Ralph Moore writes that the performance was an, "account to vie with the very best, immeasurably enhanced by an extraordinarily rich and complex arrangement and “elaboration” of the accumulated mass of sketches and sections of score which Bruckner left behind. Even without the finale, this would have been a monumental event; the addition of Schaller’s completion made it one of those musical memories to treasure", and concludes that, "Schaller certainly makes musical sense of the remnants of Bruckner’s score and the memory of my encounter with the final ten minutes of this performance remains for me one of the most thrilling musical experiences of my life." Bruckner Insiders described it as "one of the bests sounds and interpretations", and continued,

Ken Ward writes in The Bruckner Journal of Schaller's aims in embarking on his completion:

The fugue of the final movement is particularly central to Schaller’s completion - the heightened contrapuntal tension concentrated into this fugue is used in the finale as a lead to the climax to the thematic material at the start of the symphony, transposed to the major key, and as a polythematic review of all movements as in the Eighth Symphony. Ward writes of it, "The fugue worked very well, with tension maintained and intensifying strongly. The recapitulation of the triplet horn theme, where Bruckner’s completed bifolios cease, continues and builds and then falls quiet." In his completion of the coda of the final movement, Schaller draws on themes and motives from across Bruckner’s works in the form of a compositional retrospective with building-blocks from earlier symphonies, choral symphonic works and thematic references to other movements of the Ninth.

Technical details for the Schaller Completion of Bruckner's Ninth

Instruments: Threefold woodwind (flutes, oboes, B flat clarinets, bassoons); brass: 8 horns in F (7th/8th also in B flat; horns 4-8 alternate with Wagner tubas: 2 tenor tubas in B flat and 2 bass tubas in F), 3 trumpets in F, alto, tenor and bass trombones, contrabass tuba; timpani; strings (violin I / II, viola, cello, double-bass).

Timings of the four movements are as follows:

Rare works

Schaller's recording career has had a strong emphasis on lesser-known operas and concert rarities, including the first recordings of numerous pieces. His recordings of lesser-known operas have included Karl Goldmark's The Queen of Sheba, and Goldmark's Merlin; as well as the first recording of Johann Simon Mayr's Fedra in co-operation with North German Radio. His first recordings of other pieces include Johann von Herbeck's Great Mass.

Schaller's recording of Merlin won the ECHO Klassik Prize in 2010 in the "Opera Recording of the Year (19th century)" category. In addition to a CD release, his performance of Franz von Suppé's Requiem has been broadcast on German television and radio.

In addition to his opera recordings, his live performances have included Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Jules Massenet's Hérodiade, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Dead Ciyt, and Leoš Janáček's The Makropulos Affair.

Orchestra conducting

Schaller has conducted the following orchestras:

Recordings of Anton Bruckner's symphonies

Recordings with the Munich Philharmonic Choir

Other recordings