Birke J. Bertelsmeier

Birke Jasmin Bertelsmeier is a German composer.

Life

Born on 23 April 1981 in Hilden, Bertelsmeier received piano lessons from Barbara Szczepanska and composition lessons from as a schoolgirl. After graduating from high school, she studied piano with Pavel Gililov at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln and composition with Wolfgang Rihm at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. She also completed a master's degree in musicology in 2009. Her works are performed at international festivals and by various performers, such as the Arditti Quartet, Quatuor Diotima, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble ascolta, Ensemble recherche, Fukio Saxophone Quartet,, Marc Bouchkov, Erik Nielsen, Christoph Eschenbach, Tabea Zimmermann, Orchester Nationale de Lorraine,, Bamberg Symphony and by members of the Berliner Philharmonic. In 2017, her orchestral work for the 80th anniversary of the Bombing of Guernica was premiered for the Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa with choir and children's choir.
In 2014, two music theatre works, Querelle of Brest after Jean Genet and The Nightingale and the Rose after Oscar Wilde's short story of that name, were premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and at Taschenopernfestival in Salzburg in 2017 the piece Gib mir Dein after a story by Thomas Mann.
Bertelsmeier taught composition in youth seminars at the Beethoven House and the . From 2009 to 2011, she taught improvisation and composition at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover.