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Director
Graziella Contratto
After training to become a concert pianist, Graziella Contratto devoted herself to chamber music and song accompaniment in particular, and Bruno Canino, Mathias Enderle (Carmina Quartet), György Sebök, Gérard Wyss and Kurt Widmer helped to shape her musical career. Starting in 1991, she trained to become a director of music under Rudolf Kelterborn, Detlev Müller-Siemens, Horst Stein, Manfred Honeck and Ralf Weikert. In addition, she worked with Jorma Panula, Kirk Trevor and Tsung Yeh in various courses.
In 1992, Graziella Contratto was employed by the Musikhochschule Luzern (School of Music in Lucerne) as the youngest music theory lecturer in Switzerland. Moreover, from 1995 to 1999, she was in charge of putting together concerts for the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in Lucerne. Since then, Graziella Contratto has conducted various first performances – including works by Hans Werner Henze, Andrea Scartazzini, Jörg Widmann, Matthias Heep, Thomas Demenga, Suzanne Giraud, Daniel Glet, George Gruntz, Alain Bérlaud, … – and has commissioned numerous compositions.
In 1998, Claudio Abbado asked her to join the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as a musical assistant. Among other things, she was in charge of all concert and admission projects of the orchestra. She also played a part in the Salzburg Easter Festival: Herbert Wernicke, Klaus Michael Grüber and Peter Stein gave her unforgettable insights into their directing work.
In April 2000, the Orchestre National de Lyon (ONL) unanimously appointed Graziella Contratto as chef résident ahead of 80 other applicants. She founded the Académie de l’ONL as part of a French pioneering project.
In July 2002, she took on the role of musical director of the opera collage project “Olympic Songs” in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and, together with the director Mirella Weingarten, she produced for her home village of Schwyz the tango opera “Maria de Buenos Aires” by Astor Piazzolla in cooperation with Germans, Italians and Argentineans. In the course of the last few seasons, Graziella Contratto has conducted at the Berliner Festwochen (Berlin Festival Weeks), the Young Artists Festival Davos, the EXPO Hannover and the Muséiques-Festival under Gidon Kremer. She has also conducted the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, the Deutsche Kammerorchester Berlin, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the German Chamber Academy Neuss, the Göttinger Sinfoniker, the Orchestre Picardie and the Basse Normandie, the Bern Symphonic Orchestra, the Sinfonietta of the Manhattan School of Music (NY) and since 2005 she has been the artistic director of Camerata Schweiz.
Since September 2003, Graziella Contratto has been the first woman in France to be the chief conductor of a national orchestra: the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie. In the first season, the French media stated that she was very original when choosing what works to include in the programme and that she made the audience very sensitised to unknown and contemporary works. Moreover, her concert introductions met with great approval. Graziella Contratto works with famous artists, such as Bruno Ganz, Anna Larsson, Ning Liang, Anne Gastinel, Michel Portal, Raphael Oleg, Emmanuelle Bertrand, Maria Elisabeth Lott, Lisa Larsson, Donald Littaker, Lothar Odinius and Stefan Genz.
For several years, she has been a regular guest on various radio and TV channels in Switzerland, France and Germany (DRS, RSR, Harald Schmidt, France 3 and Mezzo). Graziella Contratto was the musical advisor to Bettina Ehrhardt for her award-winning films about Luigi Nono (Eine Kielspur im Meer), Bobby Mc Ferrin (We Play) and Helmut Lachenmann. In September 2005, the music channel Mezzo broadcast a programme on her life entitled “Graziella Contratto – entre grâce et maîtrise” by Perrine Robert.
In July 2006, Graziella Contratto was voted in as the new artistic director of the Davos Festival.
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