Biography

Frieder Bernius is a pillar of choral music culture in Stuttgart, Germany, founding several ensembles and conducting performances that are often historically oriented. He has also conducted orchestral music, and he has an exceptionally large recording catalog. Bernius was born on June 22, 1947, in Ludwigshafen, in what was then West Germany. His father was a Protestant minister, and his mother was a church musician. Bernius attended a Gymnasium high school in Mannheim and then studied music performance and musicology at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen. At the former, in 1968, he founded the Kammerchor Stuttgart ("Stuttgart Chamber Choir"). He also conducted various German radio choirs in the 1970s, but he continued to develop the sound of the Kammerchor Stuttgart; it had begun with a repertory of 19th and 20th century a cappella music, but by the mid-'80s, it had turned decisively toward early music. He remained the choir's director in the early 2020s. The group began to record for the Carus (Carus-Verlag) label, issuing Hör mein Bitten, an album of Mendelssohn's church music, in 1983. In 1985, he founded the Barockorchester Stuttgart ("Stuttgart Baroque Orchestra") and later the Klassische Philharmonie Stuttgart. Beginning in the 1980s, the Kammerchor Stuttgart began to tour widely, in North and South America and in Asia as well as Europe, and a series of visits to Israel, still unusual for a German group at the time, began in 1984. Signed to the Sony Classical label in 1989, Bernius released albums there in the 1990s with the Kammerchor Stuttgart and other groups; he led a recording of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice with the Baroque group Tafelmusik in 1993. His recordings won several major prizes, including the Edison Prize in the Netherlands, for a recording with the Cologne Musica Fiata of Schütz's Symphoniae Sacrae III and France's Diapason d'Or for an album featuring Zelenka's Missa Dei Filii, again with Tafelmusik. Bernius also performed and recorded orchestral music, often with the Hofkapelle Stuttgart, of which he became music director in 2002. He has continued to record prolifically for Carus, Orfeo, Hänssler Classic, and other German labels, often issuing music by little-known Baroque and Classical-era composers such as Johann Gottlieb Naumann, Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda, and Justin Heinrich Knecht. By 2022, when he led the Kammerchor Stuttgart and Hofkapelle Stuttgart in a recording of Schubert's Mass in A flat major, D. 678, for Hänssler Classic, his recording catalog comprised some 120 items. ~ James Manheim, Rovi