I’ve been passionate about Historically Informed Performance (HIP) for as long as I can remember. Well, for nearly 40 years at any rate. 

HIP is when you ask questions like “how would they have played it when the piece was written?” and “what kind of instruments would they have played it on?”. In the picture I’m playing a violin set up as it would have been in about 1720, with plain gut strings, a different shaped bridge, and a different type of bow. It sounds quite dissimilar to today’s “modern” violin, and I find that difference exciting and inspirational.

In the picture you can see me on film, being accompanied by myself in real life. I aksed my friend and colleague Noam Zur to write a musical commentary to Bach’s C major Sonata and this is a screenshot from a short clip (in German) where I talk about how  I dealt with being a free-lance musician hit by the pandemic.

Apart from stuff like this I’ve performed all over the world as a member of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, I hold a PhD on the non-economic value of music from the University of Southampton, UK, I teach music in the context of social work at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, and generally free-lance in Germany with orchestras such as Concerto Köln and the Hofkapelle München.