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Birgit Remmert is a well-known German alto/contralto/mezzo-soprano singer with a wide repertory.

She studied at the Detmold Conservatory with Professor Helmut Kretschmer. Upon graduation, she immediately began receiving engagements to sing. She debuted in an unusual work, Heinrich von Biber's Requiem, under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Another of her notable early appearances was in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under Harnoncourt in London, then in the Styrarte Festival, a performance ultimately released on compact disc.

In 1989, she took the title role of Othmar Schoeck's Penthesilea in the Festival de Montpellier.

She won the German Music Critics' Prize and Golden Palm award of Ligure in the song recital category. Her debut recital showed her wide musical interest and knack for intriguing program building by including songs of Brahms, Baur, Clara Schumann, Samuel Barber, and Pyotr Tchaikovky.

Offers followed that brought her to sing in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, and Poland. She joined the Zürich Opera in the 1992-1993 season. Her roles in her debut year were the Third Lady in The Magic Flute, Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, Dame Quickly in Falstaff, Zita in Gianni Schicchi, and Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera. The last-named of those is one of her most often-repeated roles.

She made her debut at the Hamburg State Opera in 1993 as Erda in Wagner's Siegfried, and the next year added to her repertory that goddess' other appearance in Wagner's Ring, in Das Rheingold.

She sang in the Salzburg Festival of 1993 as Nutrice in Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea and has gone on to add the roles of the Old Princess in Puccini's Soeur Angelica and Offenbach's La Perichole.

She also sings recitals frequently, and as a concert singer, has in her repertory, among other items Masses of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mendelssohn's Erste Walputrgisnacht, and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. She has song with the Berlin Philharmonic, The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic under such conductors as Philippe Herreweghe, Carlo Maria Giulini, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, and Wolfgang Sawallisch.

In May of 1995, she was selected to participate in the prestigious complete Mahler project of the Royal Concertgebouw.

She moved into one of the darker soprano roles as Fricka in Wagner's Rheingold and Walküre at the Bayreuth Festival in 2000.

Baritone Christian Gerhaher had a meteoric rise after his 1998 victory in the New York/Paris-shared Prix International Pro Musicis. Gerhaher subsequently developed a major career on both the operatic and recital stages. His repertory takes in J.S. Bach cantatas and oratorios; operas by Mozart, von Weber, and Wagner; lieder by Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler; and concert works by Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Mahler. He has hardly restricted himself to the German sphere, though, having performed Orff's Carmina Burana, Britten's War Requiem, Monteverdi's Orfeo, and much else. Gerhaher possesses a very distinct, attractive voice, a bit higher in the baritone range than is usual. He has performed at many of the major recital halls and operatic venues and with an extensive list of conductors that includes Harnoncourt, Rattle, and Muti. Gerhaher's résumé, apart from his considerable musical activity, is impressive: he holds a doctorate degree in medicine and has extensively studied philosophy.

Christian Gerhaher was born in the Bavarian city of Straubing on July 24, 1969. His major educational activity was in Munich: he studied voice with Paul Kuen and Raimund Grumbach and enrolled at the Musikhochschule Opera School there, simultaneously studying medicine and philosophy. Gerhaher later took master classes with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. For Gerhaher, 1998 was a pivotal year: he obtained his medical degree, won the Prix International Pro Musicis, and joined the Stadttheater Würzburg, remaining a member until 2000. Meanwhile, he began making critically acclaimed appearances in lieder repertory with pianist Gerold Huber, including at Carnegie Hall, the Schubertiade in Feldkirch, and Wigmore Hall in London. Gerhaher quickly built a reputation in opera as well: his 2005 performance at the Frankfurt Opera in the title role of Orfeo drew rave notices. In the following season, Gerhaher appeared in Schubert's opera Alphonso und Estrella in Berlin and Schumann's oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri in Munich. Gerhaher's 2007-2008 schedule included a highly acclaimed North American tour with pianist Gerold Huber.

As Gerhaher entered middle age and his voice deepened somewhat, he took on operatic roles such as Wolfram in Wagner's Tannhäuser, which he performed at London's Covent Garden in 2010 and reprised at the Bavarian State Opera in 2017. Nevertheless, the bulk of Gerhaher's recording energies in the 2010s continued to focus on the lieder repertory. His 2012 album, Ferne Geliebte, featuring not only the Beethoven cycle An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98, but also songs by Haydn, Schoenberg, and Berg, inaugurated a multi-year relationship with the Sony Classical label that has also produced Nachtviolen (a Schubert song recital) and an album of Mozart arias. His performances of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Kindertotenlieder deepened his relationship with Huber, which was displayed to fine effect in their 2017 recording of the unusual Brahms song set Die schöne Magelone, Op. 33. A long-held goal of Gerhaher's was accomplished in 2021 when he issued a much-heralded recording of the complete songs of Schumann. In 2022, Gerhaher and Heinz Holliger teamed up on a pair of recordings: Othmar Schoeck's Elegie with the Kammerorchester Basel and Holliger's opera Lunea, which was written for and dedicated to Gerhaher. ~ Robert Cummings & James Manheim

Perhaps no single musician ever achieved such high accomplishment across such a broad span of repertory as Nikolaus Harnoncourt. His first professional job was as cellist for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Almost immediately, however, Harnoncourt sought to specialize in performing music of the past upon historically correct instruments; he was one of the first professional musicians to do so. Over the course of a stunningly influential career, Harnoncourt gradually worked forward into more modern repertories. His many awards included repeated top recording medals from at least six European countries, and a Grammophone Award for Special Achievement in 1990. His decades of recordings on the Teldec label fully encompassed seven centuries of music history.

Harnoncourt considered his own life strongly influenced by an adolescence under the shadow of Nazism. He was born Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt in Berlin; his aristocratic family moved south to its ancestral mansion in Graz, Austria. After years of hardship under the Nazi regime, the Harnoncourt family fled to Salzburg in 1945. There he found his calling, and began studying the cello under Paul Grummer. No less a figure than Herbert von Karajan accepted Harnoncourt into the Vienna Symphony in 1952. However, his path was destined elsewhere. While in college, Harnoncourt became fascinated by the original Baroque instruments languishing in antique shops, and wondered why professional musicians didn't use these brilliant artifacts to produce the music of their time.

In 1953, Harnoncourt and his wife Alice founded the Concentus Musicus Wien, the first professional Baroque orchestra. They took players from the symphony, trained collaboratively for four years on early instruments, and exploded onto the European scene in 1957. Their first recording project was the Purcell Viol Fantasias, followed by a series of highly acclaimed recordings of the major works of Bach. In the 1970s, Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt collaborated on a massive recording project of all Bach's cantatas. Meanwhile, Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus romped through much of the Baroque literature, including Monteverdi's operas, Telemann, Rameau, and Fux. Later, he broadened his repertory to include Haydn and Mozart with Concentus Musicus, as well as masterworks from the 19th century operatic and symphonic repertory (including a million-selling cycle of Beethoven symphonies) with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He taught as professor of performance practice at the Salzburg Mozarteum (1972-1993), and wrote three full-length books on the subject closest to his heart. He maintained a close relationship guest conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the years just before his retirement in late 2015 for health reasons. Harnoncourt passed away soon after, leaving behind a legacy as a widely knowledgable, collegial, and well-respected conductor.

Luba Orgonasova's home town of Bratislava has long been one of the major regional musical centers of Central Europe. She attended the Conservatory and the Music Academy of the city, where she studied piano and voice.

She began her singing career at Bratislava's opera house, then was invited to sing as a guest at the Hagen Opera House in 1984. Following that appearance, she received a contract as a member of that company as its First Lyric Soprano, remaining there to the end of the 1988 season. While there she sang in many leading parts, including two for which she would become famous, Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata and Pamina in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. She sang Pamina at the Vienna State Opera and recorded it in 1989.

Maestro Herbert von Karajan heard her sing and invited her to appear in the 1990 Salzburg Easter Festival and the summer Salzburg Festival in 1990, where she sang Marzelline in Beethoven's Fidelio. Later in that season she sang Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera and Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio in Paris.

Since then she has sung on all the major operatic stages of the world, and in concert performance with many of the great orchestras. Among her signature roles is that of Eurydice in Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice.