For decades, Tanja Tetzlaff has been one of the most influential musicians of her generation, both as soloist and chamber musician. Her playing is characterized by a uniquely fine yet powerful and nuanced sound, which always goes hand in hand with cultivated musicality. Tanja Tetzlaff’s trademark is her extraordinarily broad repertoire and her desire for new, groundbreaking concert formats.
In April 2021, Tanja Tetzlaff became the first scholarship holder to be awarded the highly endowed Glenn Gould Bach Fellowship of the city of Weimar. She now has the opportunity to realize a two-year film project relating Bach’s famous cello suites to nature and climate change issues: Suites4Nature / Suites for a Wounded World.
Tanja Tetzlaff is a founding member of the Tetzlaff Quartet (Christian Tetzlaff, Elisabeth Kufferath, and Hanna Weinmeister). She plays a cello by Giovanni Baptista Guadagnini from 1776.

Born in Leningrad (now once more Saint Petersburg) into an artistic family of Jewish origin, Dina Ugorskaja started learning the piano when she was young, as well as voice and composition. In 1990, when she was fifteen years old, she became the target of anti-Semitic threats; her family had to leave the Soviet Union abruptly, and they fled together to Germany.
The “philosopher at the piano” has made herself a name with a performance style marked by profound sensitivity and sobriety.
Her engagements have led her to make solo appearances at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, the Philharmonie in Cologne, the Herkulessaal in Munich, the Sala Verdi in Milan, and Radio France Auditorium in Paris. She has been invited to perform at festivals including the Schubertiade in Feldkirch and the Kassel Music Festival.

Dina Ugorskaja is also passionately committed to chamber music: for instance, ever since her participation at Lars Vogt’s chamber music festival Spannungen in Heimbach, she has formed a duo together with the renowned cellist Tanja Tetzlaff.
2019 marked the 10th anniversary of her fruitful collaboration with the CAvi-Music label. In coproduction with Bavarian Radio (Munich), she has released recordings of Handel suites, late Schumann works, the six last Beethoven sonatas, and both volumes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – all of which have been praised by critics.

Regarding her recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, Eleonore Büning wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine: The immense Adagio sostenuto, bearing the indication that it is to be played ‘passionately and with much feeling’, is rendered as a sublime, radiant hymn, and one would no longer want to hear it any other way.
Regarding her recording of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Crescendo magazine wrote in October 2016: The listener does not feel directly addressed, but rather as the silent witness of these intimate dialogues between Bach, God, and the universe – thanks to the fact that Dina Ugorskaja always maintains a noble distance that protects the inner fragility of Bach’s musical discourse. […] This is an impressive manifesto for the freedom of the human intellect.” Ugorskaja’s recordings for CAvi-music have been repeatedly nominated for the International Classical Music Awards and for the German Music Critics’ Prize. Her last album with works by Schubert received the ICMA award posthum.
​​​​​​​ Dina Ugorskaja passed away after a long period of illness in September 2019.

Hartmut Rohde thrills audiences with his exceptional variety of sonorities, his stylistic versatility, and his historically informed approach to music ranging from the Baroque to contemporary compositions. Rohde’s performances are captivating due to his sheer power of imagination (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). He is one of the leading and most sought-after European violists. Since 1993 he has held a professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts, and is founding member of the renowned Mozart Piano Quintet which undertakes extensive worldwide tours. His chamber music partners include David Geringas, Janine Jansen, Jörg Widmann, Radovan Vlatkovic, Paul Meyer, Lars Vogt, Kolja Blacher, and Sharon Kam. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Seoul Arts Center and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, as well as at a number of outstanding festivals in Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Japan, Ravinia (USA), Australia, Heimbach (“Spannungen”), and Jerusalem. Rohde has performed solo viola concertos with renowned orchestras in Munich, Weimar, Bonn, Hannover, and Lithuania, as well as with chamber orchestras from Munich, Lithuania and Basel, collaborating with conductors such as Kent Nagano, Georg Alexander Albrecht, Paavo Järvi, Massimo Zanetti, and Michael Sanderling. Composers of the likes of Brett Dean, Sören N. Eichberg, Ursula Mamlok, Krystof Maratka, Arydas Malcys, David P. Hefti, and Olli Mustonen have written works for him. From 2013 to 2017 he served as Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the NFM Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra in Wroclaw. Starting with the 2017/18 season, he is expanding his conducting activities to other orchestras.
Thus in 2019/20 he will go on tour to Vienna (Musikverein), Hamburg (Laeiszhalle), Budapest, Lviv, Slovenia, and Germany with the Budapest Franz Lizst Chamber Orchestra and with Lviv Symphony Orchestra. His appearances as conductor have already led him to perform at the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf, the Pablo Casals Festival in Prades (France), and the Wratislawia Cantans Festival in Wroclaw. He has made numerous international radio recordings, as well as CDs for EMI Classics, Decca, CAvI-music, BMG/Sony, MDG, CPO, and Naxos. In 2004, he won the Supersonic Award. Hartmut Rohde plays a viola by Giuseppe Fiorini and a viola by Ivo Iuliano.

As a chamber musician, soloist, conductor and concertmaster – equally at home on the violin and viola – he is a highly esteemed partner of many renowned musicians and a welcome guest at prestigious chamber music series and festivals. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Rottweil Music Festival Sommersprossen; together with his wife, Tanja Tetzlaff, he curates the chamber music series residenz@sendesaal at Sendesaal Bremen. With the Signum Quartet as its leader, he has travelled to international venues throughout Europe and even to New York‘s Carnegie Hall.
As concertmaster and artistic director, he is a guest performer with various European chamber orchestras and a lecturer in violin, chamber music and orchestral playing at numerous universities. He plays a violin made by German violin maker Peter Greiner in 2003, as well as bows by Nico Plog from Antwerp.

The search for truthful expression, along with the endeavour to forge a poetic narrative of sound – these are the cornerstones of violist Pauline Sachse’s ongoing artistic pursuit.
In 2013 she was appointed viola professor at the Carl Maria von Weber School of Music in Dresden. At that point she left her previous solo position at Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and resigned as guest professor from the Berlin Hanns Eisler School of Music in order to devote herself fully to her new teaching duties while maintaining her activities as solo and chamber musician.

Pauline Sachse is in high demand on the chamber music scene: she performs in recitals with artists such as Isabelle Faust, Tabea Zimmermann, Lars Vogt, Lauma Skride, Christian Tetzlaff, Anna Prohaska, Martin Helmchen, Marie-Elisabeth Hecker, Harriet Krijgh, Martin Fröst, Antje Weithaas, Benjamin Schmid, and Janine Jansen. She is regularly invited to appear at important festivals including Salzburg, Heidelberg, Spannungen (Heimbach), Moritzburg, Schwetzingen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Born in Hamburg, Pauline Sachse was trained as a violist at the Hanns Eisler School of Music, at the Berlin University of the Arts, and at Yale University, under the tutelage of Jesse Levine, Wilfried Strehle and – for many years – Tabea Zimmermann, whose assistant she became at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in 2007. She gained further significant insight from studies with the Alban Berg Quartet.

In ensembles such as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the Berlin Philharmonic, she worked with renowned conductors, including Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Mariss Jansons, Simon Rattle, and Seiji Ozawa.
Pauline Sachse combines a variety of artforms in her artistic and educational approach, including classical dance ever since her youth. Today she forms her thoughts not only in sound, but also sculpts them in words and in stone. She makes sculptures, performs interdisciplinary artistic experiments, and publishes articles in her ongoing quest for truthful expression. On the podium, Pauline Sachse’s instrumental partner is the Madame Butterfly viola made by Paolo Maggini in Brescia in 1610.