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German soprano Mojca Erdmann began her musical career singing in a children's chorus at the Hamburg State Opera. She took voice lessons from Evelyn Herlitzius, and went on to study at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, where she worked with Hans Sotin and Ingrid Figur. She competed in the Bundeswettbewerb Gesang Berlin für Oper, where she won the special prize for contemporary music in 2002. She won the Luitpold Prize of the Kissinger Sommer Festival in 2005, and also won the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Music Prize at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival. Among the roles Erdmann has sung are Sempronia in Offenbach's one-act opérette-bouffe, Apothicaire et perruquier, Ariadne in Rihm's Dionysos, Despina in Mozart's Così fan tutte, and Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Erdmann received a scholarship from the Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo in 2018, and was in residence in early spring, working on various projects. Erdmann has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Capriccio Records, CPO, RCA Red Seal, Onyx Classics, and Orfeo. ~ Blair Sanderson

Versatile and equally at home as part of a rock concert or a contemporary music program, the Irish Chamber Orchestra is one of Ireland's most popular ensembles of any kind. The group has had an international orientation and a succession of non-Irish conductors from the beginning, and its reputation extends far beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. The Irish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1963 by Hungarian conductor János Fürst, who also later served as concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Ulster Orchestra. In 1970, under new principal conductor André Prieur, the group was rechristened the New Irish Chamber Orchestra, but it reverted to its original name in 1995 when it assumed its headquarters at the University of Limerick. An unusual feature of the orchestra is that it maintains its own state-of-the-art recording studio on that school's campus. Its music directors have included Fionnuala Hunt, Nicholas McGegan, and Anthony Marwood, and in the 2010s it has been led by an unusual partnership of principal artistic partner Gabor Tákacs-Nagy (another Hungarian) and principal guest conductor Jörg Widmann, also a prominent clarinetist. The Irish Chamber Orchestra presents a concert series each year in Limerick and Dublin, and it has an impressive record of foreign touring for a small orchestra from a small country: it has appeared on tour across Europe, Australia, South Korea, China, and North and South America, with Widmann's presence leading to frequent appearances in Germany especially. The Irish Chamber Orchestra is a reliable festival guest across Europe, beginning a three-year residency at Germany's Heidelberger-Frühling Festival in 2016, and it has appeared in a classic rock program at the Irish rock festival Feile-The Trip to Tipp. With Chamber Choir Ireland, it presented the Irish premiere of James MacMillan's Stabat Mater. The orchestra has been vigorous in its support of musicians in Limerick, providing free music teaching to some 300 children there, and teaching classes in the University of Limerick Music Department's strings program. The Irish Chamber Orchestra has recorded for Black Box Classics, Virgin Classics, Tayberry, Toccata Classics, and Orfeo, on which the group, under Widmann, released a cycle of Mendelssohn's symphonies that offered the Symphony No. 5 in D major, Op. 108 ("Reformation"), in 2017. ~ James Manheim

Jörg Widmann is equally well known as a clarinetist and composer. He is also active as a conductor and is a significant educator.

Widmann was born on June 19, 1973, in Munich. He took up the clarinet in 1980 but showed a talent for composition as well and began lessons in that field with Kay Westermann. He entered the Hochschule für Musik in Munich as a clarinetist in 1986. In the mid-'90s, Widmann commuted between the U.S. and Germany, studying clarinet with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York and composition in Munich with Hans Werner Henze and Wilfried Hiller. He went on for further composition studies with Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe, Germany. Widmann began teaching clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg in 2001 and added composition courses to his duties in 2009.

Meanwhile, a series of prizes added to his renown as a composer: among other honors, his opera Das Gesicht im Spiegel was selected as the most important world premiere of the 2003-2004 season by Opernwelt magazine, and in 2006, he received the Claudio Abbado Composition Award from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Academy. He has been composer-in-residence with increasingly prestigious institutions, including the Lucerne Festival in 2009, the Rheingau Music Festival in 2014, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra from 2017 to 2018, and in 2019-2020, holding the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall. He also held a composer residency with the Berlin Philharmonic. In 2020, he contributed the work empty space to the online Festival of New Music during the Covid pandemic; the work was tailored for the empty Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin.

Widmann's compositions fall into a wide variety of idioms, from purely tonal to pitchless. According to a Bachtrack ranking in 2018, he was the world's third-most-often-performed composer, after only Arvo Pärt and John Williams. As a clarinetist, Widmann has performed both contemporary music and traditional repertory; he has collaborated on new works with such composers as Rihm, Aribert Reimann, and Heinz Holliger. Widmann has also toured with the Hagen Quartet, and in 2017, he became the principal conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. More than 60 of Widmann's compositions have been recorded, prominent among them his four string quartets. He has also made more than 20 recordings as a solo clarinetist, again covering both contemporary and traditional repertory, for such labels as Orfeo, Harmonia Mundi, and Wergo. In 2020, he moved to ECM for a recording of Brahms' clarinet sonatas with pianist András Schiff, an album that also included Widmann's own Five Intermezzi for piano. In 2024, he returned on the Myrios Classics label with an album on which he was featured as both performer (of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581) and composer (of his own Clarinet Quintet). He holds the Edward Said Chair in Composition at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin. ~ James Manheim