Austrian conductor Christina Pluhar is one of the most innovative musicians of the early music scene.
With her irrepressible enthusiasm for music, she won the ECHO Klassik award in 2009, 2010, and 2011. In 2018, Opus Klassik awarded the ensemble L'Arpeggiata with the title ‘Ensemble of the Year’. The critics rave about the liberated, spontaneous, and highly virtuosic way in which the instrumentalists and singers bring the selected works to life under Pluhar's direction, as they are able to coax sounds from them that have never been heard in such vivid colour before.
Christina Pluhar's CDs and concerts enchant audiences and her interpretations, arrangements, and musical discoveries have left their mark on today's early music world.
The music world owes Christina Pluhar a great deal—both the early music scene and 21st-century concert culture as a whole. With the founding of her ensemble L'Arpeggiata in 2000, the conductor, lutenist, harpist, arranger, and composer succeeded in breaking down long-held structures of interpretation and understanding of early music and renewing perspectives. Through her approach, Christina Pluhar opened up Baroque music to an unexpectedly wide audience.
Christina Pluhar was born in Graz in 1965. She studied concert guitar in her hometown and began studying the lute at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 1984, she graduated in 1987. Christina Pluhar continued her studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis under Hopkinson Smith and received her diploma in early music in 1992. She studied the baroque harp at the Scuola Civica in Milan.
Since 1992, she works as a freelance musician and lives in her adopted home of Paris. She has performed as a soloist and basso continuo player with numerous ensembles such as La Fenice, Hesperion XXI, Il Giardino Armonico, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Concerto Soave, and many others.
From 1997 to 2005, she worked as assistant to Ivor Bolton at the Munich State Opera, the Opéra Garnier in Paris, the Hamburg Opera, and the Maggio Musicale in Florence, among others.
With the founding of L’Arpeggiata in 2000, Pluhar breathed new life into the revolutionary spirit of the early music scene: from the beginning, instead of interpretative routines, she focused on experimental, liberated, and improvisational ensemble playing. She broke with the routine of basso continuo playing, arranged well-known and unknown works, and gave 17th-century music a new colorfulness.
L'Arpeggiata brings together the absolute masters of their craft on stage. Like her repertoire, Christina Pluhar also selects her fellow musicians and guest artists with the utmost care. Her guests include not only stars from the field of historical performance practice, but also from jazz and traditional music.
L'Arpeggiata has since performed to sold-out houses on all international stages. Their CD recordings have been praised by audiences and the press and have won numerous awards. Concert tours have taken the ensemble throughout Europe, Australia, South America, Japan, China, New Zealand, and the USA.
In 2012, L'Arpeggiata became the first early music ensemble ever to be named ‘ensemble in residence’ at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Since founding her ensemble L'Arpeggiata, they have released 18 successful albums. In their CD projects, Christina Pluhar and her musicians devote themselves to an experimental style, while also masterfully speaking the strict language of historically informed performance practice. They approach the work in all its facets at the highest interpretive and musical level.
L'Arpeggiata's CD recordings on the Alpha, Naïve, and Erato/Warner Classics are not only bestsellers but have also won numerous awards such as the Echo Klassik, Edison Prize, VSCD Muziekprijs, Cannes Classical Awards, Timbre de platine d'Opéra international, BBC Magazine, Prix Exellentia Pizzicato, ffff Télérama, Coup de cœur de l'Académie Charles Cros, and many more.
The film ‘Tous les soleils’, directed by writer Philippe Claudel and released in March 2011, was inspired by the music from her legendary album ‘La Tarantella’. Two tracks from this album were re-recorded for the movie, featuring the voice of lead actor Stefano Accorsi.
Christina Pluhar has also achieved great success as an opera conductor. In her work as director of L'Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar explores new approaches to opera interpretation, viewing compositions not only from the perspective of a musical director, but always with the entire performance in mind. Her opera performances are always extraordinary, revolutionary, and real crowd-pullers, as her arrangements and the deliberate historical contextualization of her interpretations greatly expand the horizons. To date, Christina Pluhar has arranged, adapted, and interpreted numerous Baroque operas with L'Arpeggiata, both scenically and in concert.
In 2005, she recorded Emilio de' Cavalieri's work ‘Rappresentatione di anima, et di corpo’ and revolutionized the understanding of recitar cantando with her recording.
Between 2009 and 2012, she performed excerpts from Luigi Rossi's opera ‘Il palazzo incantato’ together with Sicilian puppeteer Mimmo Cutticcio at venues including the Baroque Palace Theater in Ludwigsburg.
In 2011, Christina Pluhar starred at the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival and the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music in Giovanni Andrea Bontempi's opera ‘Il Paride’ (1662) in a production by Christoph von Bernuth.
In 2014, she received a composition commission from the Teatro Mayor in Bogotá, Colombia, where she performed her cross-opera ‘Orfeo Chamán’ in a production by Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden. The opera was released on CD and DVD by Erato/Warner Classics in 2016.
In 2017, she and choreographer Mei Hong Lin created the acclaimed dance piece ‘Music & dance for a while’ at the Landestheater Linz, which was awarded with the Austrian Music Theater Prize.
Between 2016 and 2021, she conducted Claudio Monteverdi's ‘Orfeo’ several times with Claudio Rolando Villazón in the title role.
In 2019, she conducted the world premiere of Georg Caspar Schürmann's opera ‘Die getreue Alceste’ (1719) in a production by Jan Eßinger at the Rokokotheater Schwetzingen.
In January 2022, she conducted Mozart's ‘Il Re Pastore’ in concert at the Mozartfest Salzburg. In 2023, she conducted the staged production of Handel's 'Belshazzar' by Marie-Eve Signeyrole at the Theater an der Wien.
She has been teaching baroque harp at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague (NL) since 1999.