| Christian Zehnder Trio（Switzerland） |
Christian Zehnder，born in Zurich in 1961, lives and works in Basel.
Following interrupted jazz studies (Lucerne/Bern) as a guitarist, he studied singing with the baritone Raphael Laback, among others. He holds master degrees in Instrument (Voice) and Pedagogics.
He went on to study overtone singing with Tokne Nonaka in Japan and Alfred Wolfsohn’s body-voice techniques with Daniel Prieto in Portugal. He also spent many years researching the non-verbal expressive potential of the human voice and the yodel as communication form – 'global yodelling'. With his unremitting exploration of European overtone singing techniques, he is regarded in the professional arena as one of the most creative contributors to the scene.
In 1996 he founded the project stimmhorn with wind player Balthasar Streiff, which went on to gain international recognition and several awards on the back of their many CDs, films and music theatre productions. He has toured with Huun-Hur-Tu, the African overtone choir Noquolnquo, Mercan Dede, Don Li and many others.
Zehnder works as an actor-musician in theatre projects, as a director and composer for the theatre (Theater Basel, Salzburger Festspiele, Mannheim, Lucerne, Gorki Theater Berlin, etc.). He has composed many pieces for film, television and radio and taught overtone singing, vocal techniques and choral singing in Switzerland and abroad. Amongst others, he has coached the Latvian Radio Choir in Riga. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the Oslo Conservatoire and the Basel Music Academy. He made his first solo CD with the Zehnder Kraah Trio, which involved guests such as Christoph Marthaler, Noldi Alder, Don Li and Anton Bruhin, as well as the Casal Quartet, with whom he was also worked alongside the Swiss composer Fortunat Frölich in the Wetterleuchten project in the chamber/new music arena. A collaboration with Swiss hammered dulcimer innovator Barbara Schirmer resulted in the Gländ project – a foray into uncharted new alpine music territory; Zehnder also sang one of the lead roles in the contemporary opera Amazonas at the 2010 Munich Biennale. The Christian Zehnder Quartet recently launched his new alpine project Schmelz.
Swiss musician and performer Zehnder, who has made an international name for himself in recent years with the stimmhorn duo, is creating a novel yet at the same time native form of music; his virtuosic overtone singing is unmatched in western cultural circles. |
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