Bohorquez Claudio

Claudio Bohórquez has been hailed as one of the most exciting and fascinating musicians of his generation by conductors, audiences, concert presenters and critics alike. He has performed as a soloist with an impressive range of internationally renowned orchestras and conductors and sung with famous chamber music partners. Claudio Bohórquez also works on a variety of special projects in the field of the visual and performing arts.

As a student of Boris Pergamenschikow, Claudio Bohórquez achieved success at an early age at two international competitions (the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Rostropovich Cello Competition in Paris). This culminated in 2000 with three awards at the first International Pablo Casals Competition, held under the auspices of the Kronberg Academy. Marta Casals Istomin presented Claudio Bohórquez with the first prize, a special award for the best chamber music and also the use of Casals’ Gofriller cello for a period of two years. Bohórquez also won first prize at the International Music Competition in Geneva, an achievement that marked the start of his career as a soloist. As well as performing, he is a teacher himself: he was a guest professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin from 2003 to 2006, and he resumed this position in October 2009.

Claudio Bohórquez has performed with the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, almost all of the German radio orchestras, the Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Collegium Musicum Basel, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre de Toulouse, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. In Japan he has appeared with both the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In the United States the musician has recently performed concerts with the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he National Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has also been invited to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington in 2010.

Renowned conductors with whom Claudio Bohórquez has worked include Daniel Barenboim,Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jonathan Darlington, Thomas Dausgaard, Christoph Eschenbach, Hans Graf, Ruben Gazarian, Manfred Honeck, Yakov Kreizberg, Sir Neville Marriner, Krzysztof Penderecki, Leonard Slatkin, Eiji Oue, Tugan Sokhiev, Lothar Zagrosekand David Zinman.

So far, highlights of the 2010–2011 season have included concerts with the Bern Symphony Orchestra under Michael Sanderling and the Berlin Konzerthausorchester's New Year's Eve concert conducted by Lothar Zagrosek. With the same orchestra he has appeared at the Rheingau Music Festival and went on to perform in Bern and other European cities together with pianist Katia Skanavi. This season he is also involved in several chamber music projects with Jörg Widmann and Dénes Várjon in Baden-Baden and Elena Bashkirovain Jerusalem.

Claudio Bohórquez has been invited to numerous festivals as a guest performer, including the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, the City of London Festival, the Penderecki Festival in Warsaw and the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival. Appearances in the United States have included performances at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen Festivals and the Hollywood Bowl. He also took part in the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival (Austria) and Gidon Kremer’s Les Musiquesfestival in Basel.

In 2007 the famous Kronberg Academy dedicated the second CD of their series The Vision exclusively to Claudio Bohórquez (recorded by Aulos MusiKado). In January 2006 the Berlin Classics label released the cellist’s first recital CD, which succeeded his earlier debut recorded under the same label together with the Dresden Philharmonic conducted byRafael Frühbeck de Burgos. In 2005 EMI Classics released his recording of Tchaikovsky’s Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in A Minor. The same year he recorded a charity CD entitled Doha for the Stupa of the Shambhala Mountain Center in the Rocky Mountains (Colorado, USA) as part of an improvisation and meditation project. His first Bach recording was released under the Plushmusic label. Besides CD recordings, radio broadcasts and television appearances, Claudio Bohórquez performed on Paul Englishby’s soundtrack of the film Ten Minutes Older – The Cello which appeared in cinemas throughout the world in 2002.

Claudio Bohórquez also worked with the artist Klaus-Peter Kirchner on Room for Pablo Casals, a work dedicated to the great cellist combining words, sounds and images.

The musician plays a Giovanni Battista Rogeri cello presented to him by the La ndeskreditbank Baden-Württemberg. Of Peruvian and Uruguayan descent, the cellist was born and grew up in Germany. He currently lives in Berlin.