The alto Dorothee Merkel, born in Cologne, studied vocal training with Christiane Gaal, Mechthild Georg and Ingeborg Danz.

Her repertoire stretches from the Renaissance via oratorios from the Baroque and the Romantic periods, right through to the present. Her areas of special interest are ancient music and historically informed performance practice. In addition, she is a keen devotee of contemporary music both on stage and on record; she has performed many premieres and released numerous CDs.

Dorothee Merkel is involved in various professional vocal ensembles such as Collegium Vocale Gent, Schola Heidelberg and Vocal Consort Berlin. As soloist, she has worked with Hermann Max, Peter Neumann and Hans Zender and has also performed at many major international festivals, for example the Festival of Ancient Music Knechtsteden, the Festival Oude Musik Utrecht, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Festival de Musica Portico Zamora and the Quincena Musical San Sebastian.

Christoph Schnackertz, born in 1984, took his first piano lessons with Clovis Alessandri, later continuing in Leipzig with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Jürgen Glauss (piano accompaniment), further fine tuning his art in his role as repetiteur to Christoph Prégardien’s singing class since 2005.

Between 2007 and 2010, Christoph Schnackertz was recipient of the Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now (Cologne) award and is also prize winner of the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Competition (Berlin 2011) for Piano Accompaniment.

Christoph Schnackertz has been a tutor for Lied Interpretation at the College of Music and Dance in Cologne since 2011.

His repertoire encompasses all the great song cycles of the Romantic period as well as songs by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Wolfgang Rihm. He also collaborates with singers in all voice ranges. His work has been documented in the form of numerous recordings with several major broadcasters.

In 2012 he teamed up with Julian Prégardien to form a permanent duo, whose joint concert activities have taken the pair to Zurich, Copenhagen, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. In May 2014, their debut CD ›An die Geliebte‹ appeared on the Myrios Classics label in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk.

The close artistic collaboration with Christoph Prégardien continues and they have already performed together at Wigmore Hall in London (a BBC recital), at the Schwetzinger Festival and at the Tonhalle in Zurich.

During the 2014/15 season, at the new Schauspielhaus in Wuppertal, ›Theater Am Engelsgarten‹ Christoph Schnackertz accompanied a scenic production of Schubert’s ›Die Schöne Müllerin‹.

Anja Manthey was raised in Wilhelmshaven, not far from the orchestra’s current home city of Bremen. She left the North Sea town to study at the University of Music in Hamburg and Freiburg. She joined the then Chamber Orchestra of the Young German Philharmonic back in 1982.

Apart from a busy orchestra schedule and regular chamber music appearances in various ensembles, she is particularly interested in the humanities. In 2012, she graduated with distinction in Musicology, German and English. For many years, Anja Manthey has contributed her enthusiasm and wealth of experience in these subjects to organizing and holding the concert introduction events ›en passant‹ and ›Auftakt‹ (engl. ›Prélude‹) for the Bremen subscription concerts.

Her favourite leisure pastimes – beyond music and musicology – include reading. In 2020, she was awarded her doctorate (DPhil).