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Michi Gaigg

What impresses me is that Michi Gaigg makes me hear a new Schubert through her own individual interpretational style.
Radio SRF 2 Kultur (Swiss Radio)

Michi Gaigg was born in Schörfling at the Attersee, Austria (Salzkammergut). She was strongly influenced by Nikolaus Harnoncourt during her violin studies at the Salzburg Mozarteum and subsequently continued studies of the Baroque violin with Ingrid Seifert and Sigiswald Kuijken. Before founding her own Baroque orchestra L’Arpa Festante Munich in 1983 (direction until 1995) Michi Gaigg was a member of internationally acclaimed ensembles and worked together with Frans Brüggen, Alan Curtis, Christopher Hogwood, René Jacobs, Ton Koopman and Hermann Max.

In 1996 she founded the L’Orfeo Barockorchester together with the recorder and oboe player Carin van Heerden. Under Michi Gaigg’s direction the orchestra has established itself as one of the leading ensembles in historically informed performance practice and has repeatedly been awarded various prizes for its CD recordings (40 productions so far) by BBC Music Magazine, Diapason, Gramophone, Pizzicato (“Supersonic Award”), Le Monde de la Musique, Fono Forum, Radio Österreich 1 (“Pasticcio Prize”) as well as the German Music Awards “Echo Klassik” and “Opus Klassik”.
In 2021 an acclaimed production of the complete symphonies and symphonic fragments by Schubert was released.

Michi Gaigg has a strong affinity for French Baroque music. The innovative and visionary strength of the music, especially the works by Jean-Philippe Rameau, is fertile soil for her interpretation of operas and orchestral repertoire from the pre-Classical era and the First Viennese School. This is the repertoire with which Michi Gaigg and the L’Orfeo Barockorchester create press and audience furore time and again. Her approach to the early Romantics Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn Bartoldy also invites new listening experiences.

In addition to her extensive concert activities as violinist and conductor Michi Gaigg first taught at the Conservatoire National de Strasbourg and from 1994-2017 at the Institute for Early Music at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz. She was the artistic director for 22 years (up to 2024) of the donauFESTWOCHEN im Strudengau, a festival for Early and Contemporary music, for which she was awarded the Artists’ Award for Stage Performance and the Medal for Cultural Achievements of the province of Upper Austria. Michi Gaigg was additionally awarded the Heinrich-Gleissner-Prize (2016) and the Honorary Art Prize (2020).

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