Concerto Köln & Clara Blessing
Biography Concerto Köln & Clara Blessing
Clara Blessing
has earned an excellent reputation as a specialist in historical instruments in recent years. Her playing, "full of emotional warmth" (ksta), touches and inspires audiences and the press in concert halls and at festivals around the world.
The oboist can be heard in a wide variety of formations, and it is precisely this versatility that she particularly loves: she regularly appears as a soloist in Johann Sebastian Bach's oboe concertos, for example, plays chamber music alongside artists such as Isabelle Faust and Kristian Bezuidenhout, and is a welcome guest with orchestras such as Concerto Köln, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and The English Concert. Her musical focus is on the Baroque and Classical repertoire, and recently she has increasingly focused on the later 19th century: she is involved in the "Wagner Readings Project" and was recently able to take over a collection of original romantic oboes, which she will soon present as part of a specially designed solo project.
Clara Blessing developed her enthusiasm for historical performance practice during her studies with Christian Schneider and Michael Niesemann, which she completed with distinction with a concert exam at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. Formative experiences at the beginning of her career were the award at the International Telemann Competition as the first musician in her field, the Academy Scheme of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and membership of the European Union Baroque Orchestra. Clara Blessing has been supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the German Foundation for Music Life and Yehudi Menuhin "Live Music Now".
In addition to playing, teaching is a matter close to Clara Blessing's heart: she teaches as a professor at the Würzburg University of Music and regularly gives master classes at home and abroad. In 2021, she published the Etudes for Hoboe with Edition Walhall, a collection of original practice pieces for baroque oboe that is very popular.
In October 2023, Clara Blessing was elected Vice President for Artistic Practice by the University Council of the Würzburg University of Music. In this position, she is committed to university life in all its facets and sets her own impulses in projects such as Network 4.0, the establishment of a Career Center and the "Days of Diversity".
