William Shimell is one of Britain’s most accomplished and successful artists. He trained at the Guildhall School of Music in London. Since winning the International Scottish Concours Noble in Glasgow he has for many years made regular guest appearances in leading opera houses throughout the world such as the Met in New York, London’s Royal Opera Covent Garden or La Scala in Milan.

He is also much in demand as a concert and oratory singer in live concert performances or CD productions, where he has worked with conductors such as Sir Georg Solti, Riccardo Chailly, Adam Fischer and Simone Young, among others. Remarkable is also his second, equally successful career as a film actor.

William Shimell performed with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen in the 2007 opera production of Igor Stravinsky’s ›The Rake’s Progress‹. He has collaborated closely with film director Michael Haneke, who has engaged Shimell in the past both as an opera singer and an actor.

The German bass-baritone Andreas Wolf studied under Prof. Heiner Eckels and Prof. Thomas Quasthoff (graduate recital). After celebrating his debut at the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival in 2007, he appeared as Guglielmo in Mozart’s ›Cosi fan tutte‹ in Beaune and at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, alongside Cecilia Bartoli in Handel’s ›Giulio Cesare‹ at the Salle Pleyel, Paris, as Zoroastro in Handel’s ›Orlando‹ at the Scottish Opera in Glasgow and at the Comic Opera in Berlin. On a CD recording entitled ›Trauermusik‹, which recieved a ›Diapason d’Or‹, he can be heard with the RIAS Kammerchor and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.

Andreas Wolf is also in high demand as an oratorio recitalist and at the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Festival inspired the audience with his interpretations of Schumann’s Dichterliebe. He has worked to date with such conductors as William Christie, Hans-Christoph Rademann, Frieder Bernius and Attilio Cremonesi. At the International Opera Festival in Aix-en-Provence in 2007 he sang in Monteverdi’s ›Orfeo‹ under the baton of René Jacobs. In the summer of 2008 he again performed in Aix-en-Provence under the direction of Jeremie Rohrer in Joseph Haydn’s opera burletta ›L’infedelta delusa‹.

Paola Gardina has won a number of Italian singing competitions.

During her studies in Rovigo, she performed at several opera houses in her native Italy and later gave guest performances on Italy’s premier opera stages in Venice, Genoa, Milan, Turin and Bologna.

Opera engagements have taken her to Lyons, Paris, Brussels, Vienna and Munich, where she has worked, for example, with Claudio Abbado, Eliahu Inbal and directors Michael Haneke and Jean Reno.

Michael Haneke is currently the most celebrated director in the German-language film-making scene and has won multiple awards including a coveted ›Oscar‹. He began his career as editor and dramaturg with the south-west German broadcasting station Südwestfunk, before working as a theatre director in Frankfurt, Munich, at Vienna’s Burgtheater and a number of other theatres.

Returning to television in 1973, he made a series of provocative TV productions. Haneke’s feature film debut was 1989’s ›The Seventh Continent‹. His international breakthrough came in 2001 with the screening of Elfriede Jelinek’s ›The Piano Teacher‹, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2006, Haneke gave his widely acclaimed debut as an opera director, staging Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ›Don Giovanni‹. His production of ›Così fan tutte‹, which he is to present for the first time with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen during the 2014 Wiener Festwochen, premiered in Madrid and Brussels and won significant critical acclaim.

Sylvain Cambreling is General Music Director of Stuttgart Opera. He is also Principal Conductor of the Yokiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. Previously he was Chief Conductor of the SWR Sinfonieorchester, Principal Guest Conductor of Klangforum Wien as well as Music Director at the Brussels and Frankfurt Opera. He has also conducted extensively at the Opéra National de Paris and the Salzburg Festival.

Cambreling balances his opera engagements with appearances with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestrass, Orchestre de Paris, Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.

Cambreling is famous for the originality of his concert-planning and persuasive championship of contemporary music. In 2009 he received the ›Echo Klassik Conductor of the Year‹ Award and in 2010 the Midem Contempary Music Award for his recording of works by Olivier Messiaen.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ›Così fan tutte‹ during the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) in 2014 marks his first collaboration with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen.

A rising star among lyric tenors, Argentinian tenor Juan Francisco Gatell trained at the Milan Conservatory.

His international career took off in 2004 after he won the Enrico Caruso Award in Italy. Performances followed at La Scala in Milan, the Staatsoper in Vienna, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris as well as in Chicago and New York.

Among other CD and DVD recordings, Gatell can be seen on DVD as Tybalt in the much-lauded Salzburg Festival production of Charles Gounod’s ›Romeo et Juliette‹ with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón.

Born in Plauen in 1986, Anett Fritsch studied with Professor Jürgen Kurth at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Music College in Leipzig. In 2001 she won first prize in the Johann Sebastian Bach competition in Leipzig and in 2006 and 2007 she was also among the prize winners of the International Chamber Opera Competition in Schloss Rheinsberg.

In 2007/08 Anett Fritsch sang a number of roles at the Leipzig Opera and, since 2009, she has been a member of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Ensemble in Düsseldorf/Duisberg. She enjoyed enormous personal success with her debut at the Glyndebourne Festival as Amirena in Handel’s ‘Rinaldo, as well as with Merione in Gluck’s Telemaco at the Theater an der Wien.

She has also sung in Mozart‘s Cosi Fan Tutti at the Teatro Real Madrid, which was subsequently performed in 2014 at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels and – with the Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen – at the Vienna Festival, also in 2014.

Anett Fritsch made her debut at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2014 as Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. For her debut with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Anett Fritsch performed the role of Susanna in Mozart’s Figaro.