“Maurice Steger’s virtuosity and sense of style are admirable”

That he is dubbed the “Paganini” and “magician of the recorder” is not surprising. In order to live up to such high expectations, one requires not only astonishing technique, but also charisma, intellect and a special sensitivity for the music. Maurice Steger has been proving all of this to his audiences, inspiring with his intense tone and unstoppable energy in various concert formats all over the world.

As a soloist, conductor or both at once, he regularly performs with the top period instrument ensembles, such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, La Cetra, Venice Baroque Orchestra, English Concert, Canadian Violons du Roy and I Barocchisti. He also performs with leading modern orchestras such as the Zürich Chamber Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Musikkollegium Winterthur, or the NDR Radiophilharmonie.

Chamber music plays a notable role in the richly varied spectrum of Maurice Steger’s artistic endeavours. With fellow musicians and friends such as Hille Perl, Avi Avital, Daniele Caminiti, Lee Santana, Naoki Kitaya, Mauro Valli, Sebastian Wienand, Fiorenza de Donatis, Diego Fasolis, Sol Gabetta or the French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, he dedicates himself to a continuously updated repertoire of Early music. Besides this, Maurice Steger also engages with new concert formats and contemporary compositions, as shown in projects with pianist Martin Stadtfeld and percussionist Christoph Sietzen. With the Kuss Quartet, Steger will try a new concert format as part of a world premiere by Iris ter Schiphorst in 2021.

Maurice Steger loves the interaction between different cultures, and getting to know other ways of working and interpretive approaches, working as a concert artist, teacher and juror, not only in Europe but throughout the world. He’s led tours of Asia and Australia with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and the Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. He was the first recorder player from the West to perform with the Traditional Taipei Chinese Orchestra.

His commitment to musical education is also extremely important to him: besides the directorship of the Gstaad Baroque Academy at the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, which he took over in 2013 in addition to diverse master classes, he invented the character of Tino Flautino in order to encourage young children to playfully engage with classical music. Tino Flautino’s newest adventure with his tomcat Leo will be presented in German, Swiss-German and Italian.

Through his own unending thirst for knowledge, he succeeds time and again to show how much there is still to be discovered about Baroque music. For example, on his recording Souvenirs, he presented works that he discovered in the private library of Count Harrach in Naples, and for this was awarded the ECHO Klassik. His album Baroque Twitter with the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the singer Nuri Rial was inspired by birdsong. The latest recording Mr. Handel’s Dinner with La Cetra Barockorchester Basel was released in the spring of 2019 and reflects on Handel’s opera performances and especially their intermissions in London. The recording was received with enthusiasm by listeners and the press.

One wonders sometimes, where Maurice Steger gets all this energy with which he has helped the recorder to make a comeback, as Arte recently presented in a documentary The Recorder: A Comeback. But when you see how much love for the instrument, the music and the audience he has in each of his many projects, it becomes clear: Maurice Steger is also carved out of very special wood.