ABOUT

Freelance musician. Bandswoman. Recording artist. Sound artist.

Andrea Ritter, 1st Prize winner at the “2007 Montreal International Recorder Competition,“ has long since gained a permanent standing among the world's leading recorder players. Emanating from the renowned Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet, and with her award winning ensembles Spark and Koschitzki & Ritter, she captures the international stage as a solo artist as well as a chamber musician. Ritter combines classical tradition and influences from contemporary avant-garde music with her passion for Kurt Weill, “film noir” and women with independent personalities such as Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Patti Smith, Simone de Beauvoir, Virgina Woolf and Romy Schneider. This is clearly reflected in her various cooperations ranging from stars of the early music scene like Dorothee Oberlinger, Maurice Steger and Reinhold Friedrich all the way to jazz chanson singer Kitty Hoff, beatboxer Robeat and DJ Emanuel Satie. In addition to her concert activities, Ritter gives master classes in Germany and abroad. Some of these courses have included the Master Courses at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Lübeck, Germany, and the International Master Classes in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. In 2005 and 2006, Andrea Ritter was guest lecturer at the prestigious Anton Bruckner University for Music, Acting and Dance Arts in Linz, Austria.

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Andrea Ritter has released several CDs with ARS Produktion, Channel Classics, Universal, Berlin Classics and Neue Meister. Her concerts were recorded and broadcasted on TV and radio stations in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Japan. She is a founding member of the ensemble Spark, patronized by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation in 2007, with the instrumentation of two recorders, violin/viola, cello and piano. Spark has already inspired numerous internationally renowned composers to new works and is an ECHO Klassik award winner for the debut album “Downtown Illusions”. Many notable concert venues have hosted Spark, among them Musikverein in Vienna, Concertgebouw Amsterdam or London’s Barbican Centre. The ensemble has given concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, WDR Funkhausorchester Köln and Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester and plays in renowned concert halls as well as in clubs, for example in Berlin's Berghain. In 2006, Andrea Ritter founded the baroque ensemble Koschitzki & Ritter together with Daniel Koschitzki, in which she puts literature for two recorders and basso continuo on stage. With this ensemble, she has been awarded 1st Prize at the International Händel Competition Göttingen in 2009.

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At the moment Ritter, as a soloist, increasingly works together with Daniel Koschitzki on the piano. In 2008, the pair introduced the duo project "Bird’s Paradise" to an international audience. The program contains numerous original arrangements and compositions, which combine classical music with jazz standards, Weill’s cabaret songs and theatrical interludes. With the album Echoing Voices, released in 2011 with ARS Produktion, Andrea made a recording of works for recorder and piano that fit her very personal style and place the recorder instrument in a very special sound context. All pieces on the album follow "their own dramaturgy, which not only creates images in the head but also tells a whole story ..." (WDR3 TonArt). The recorder player also works as a soloist with various orchestras, including the Hamburger Camerata, the Folkwang Chamber Orchestra Essen and the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra.

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Born 1978 in Erlangen, Andrea Ritter studied the recorder at the University of Music Karlsruhe with Prof. Karel van Steenhoven and graduated with distinction in summer 2007. In 2003, she received a scholarship from the Culture Fund Baden e.V. as well as from the Association Friends of the University of Music Karlsruhe and the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation Live Music Now. In the following year, a scholarship for artistic development was awarded to her by the Art Foundation Baden-Württemberg. In 2020, Ritter was offered a scholarship from Musikfonds e.V. within the framework of the government's program “Neustart Kultur”. In 2021, this was followed by a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts for the musical and conceptual development of a project on cycles in nature and music, which premiered at the Lake Constance Festival in 2022.

ABOUT

Freelance musician. Bandswoman. Recording artist. Sound artist.

ANDREA RITTER