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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

The WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, or West German Radio Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, is one of Germany's leading symphony orchestras. The group plays the music of various periods but has specialized in contemporary music, a specialty made possible by the fact that the WDR network also maintains another orchestra, the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln, that performs lighter music and pops material.

The broadcast of orchestral music on the radio in Cologne dates back almost to the foundation of the Richessender Köln radio station in 1927. After World War II, Allied administrators announced the breakup of the central broadcasting of the Nazi era in favor of a system of regional broadcasters that persists today. The Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester was established to serve the new Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (Northwest German Radio), in 1947; the name was changed to WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln in the 1990s. In the beginning, the group hosted only guest conductors, but since 1964, when Christoph von Dohnányi was named principal conductor, the orchestra has reliably spawned international conducting careers. Recent principal conductors have included Hans Vonk (1991-1997), Semyon Bychkov (1997-2010), Jukka-Pekka Saraste (2010-2019), and, since 2019, Cristian Macelaru. Guest conductors have included international greats: Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, and Zubin Mehta, among others. The orchestra's contemporary music specialty dates back many years and has included premieres of works by Luciano Berio, Hans Werner Henze, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. This tendency, along with the WDR's maintenance of its own electronic music studio directed for many years by Stockhausen, helped to establish Cologne as a center for contemporary music. The orchestra performs at the WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz and the Kölner Philharmonie.

The WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln has recorded for both German and international labels. In 1989, under frequent guest conductor Günter Wand, the orchestra released recordings of Schubert's Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944 ("The Great"), and Bruckner's Symphony No. 5 on RCA Red Seal. The orchestra has also recorded for Wergo, Audite, CPO, and many others. Although quite prolific, with more than 80 recordings to its credit as of the early 2020s, the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln has not been strongly associated with any single imprint. In 2020, the group released its first two albums on Sony Classical, Beethoven's World, and a release devoted to the violin concertos of Franz Joseph Clement, with violinist Mirijam Contzen and conductor Reinhard Goebel. ~ James Manheim

Coming on the scene in the 1980s, Jukka-Pekka Saraste was at the forefront of the wave of Scandinavian conductors that has washed across the entire classical music world. He has a broad repertory and range of interests that extend from Mozart to contemporary music of his native Finland.

Saraste was born on April 22, 1956, in Heinola, an industrial town in southern Finland. He took classes in piano and violin at the nearby Lahti Conservatory, and even when he was a preteen, his teachers urged him to consider taking up conducting. He landed a job as a violinist in the Helsinki Philharmonic but took their advice, pursuing conducting studies on the side. When he was 23, the Philharmonic invited him to mount the podium as conductor, and the orchestra's tours of the U.S. in 1982 and China in 1985 brought him new opportunities to conduct. In 1987, Saraste was named the principal conductor of both the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the former on a U.S. tour that included performances at Carnegie Hall; with the Finnish Radio Symphony, he also broadened his international reputation with tours of Britain, continental Europe, and East Asia. Saraste was named the music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1994 and was credited both with raising the group's international reputation and bringing new audiences to Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall. Saraste left both the Toronto Symphony and Finnish Radio Symphony positions in 2001 and served for several years as a guest conductor of the BBC Symphony. In 2006, he became the music director of the Oslo Philharmonic, remaining there until 2013, and he was named the music director of the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln in Germany in 2010. He stepped down from that post in 2019, and the 2019-2020 season saw him make a foray into opera, conducting Korngold's Die tote Stadt at the Finnish National Opera. Saraste is also the founder of the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, which specializes in contemporary music.

Saraste has a large catalog of recordings consisting of nearly 100 items as of 2020. They date back to recordings of 18th century concertos he made with the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra for the BIS label in the mid-1980s. He is especially noted for his recordings of Sibelius with the Toronto Symphony on the Finlandia label; the orchestra had been without a recording contract when he arrived. Saraste has made recordings with all of the orchestras he has headed, appearing on the Simax, Virgin, and Profil labels, among others; for Profil, he recorded a complete cycle of Beethoven's symphonies with the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln. In 2020, he backed Alban Gerhardt with the same ensemble in a new recording of the Shostakovich cello concertos on Hyperion. ~ James Manheim