Mark Stone & Marisol Montalvo
Biographie Mark Stone & Marisol Montalvo
Marisol Montalvo
is among one of the most sought-after exponents of contemporary music working today. Her affinity for this genre has led to regular engagements with major orchestras, Opera houses and Contemporary Music Ensembles alike.
Among the orchestras she has performed with are The Vienna Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Houston Symphony, London Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, SWR Sinfonie-Orchestra, RSO Wien, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Bamberger Symphoniker and has with worked with conductors C. Eschenbach, D. Harding, V. Jurowski, C. Hogwood, and Y. Temirkano, among others. She also has a close collaborative relationship with some of the world’s top ensembles like Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Remix and Ensemble Intercontemporain.
In Opera, she has worked at Opernhaus Zürich, Opéra National de Paris, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Théâtre du Capitole Toulouse, Theater an der Wien, Komische Oper Berlin, Theater Basel, Gran Teatro del Liceu, Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, Teatro Real de Madrid, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Theatre du Chatelet, Théatre de Geneva, La Monnaie de Munt, Opera de Monte Carlo, Lithuania National Opera, Polish National Opera and Opera Comique.
Mark Stone
studied mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, and singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1998 he was awarded the Decca Prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards.
Recent operatic engagements include the title role in Don Giovanni at the Deustche Oper Berlin, Hamburg State Opera and at the New Zealand Opera; Mountjoy (Gloriana) and Valmont (Francesconi’s Quartett) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Storch (Intermezzo) at Garsington Opera; Ned Keene (Peter Grimes) with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski and at the Beijing Festival; Il Conte (Le nozze di Figaro) at the Welsh National Opera and in Hamburg; Faninal (Der Rosenkavalier) for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Andris Nelsons; Kurwenal (Tristan und Isolde) for the London Symphony Orchestra with Daniel Harding and tours to the U.S as the Ferryman in Netia Jones’ acclaimed production of Britten’s Curlew River. His many roles at the English National Opera have included Don Giovanni, Il Conte (Le nozze di Figaro), Guglielmo (Cosi fan tutte), Marcello (La bohème), Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Enrico (Lucia di Lammermoor), Silvio (I Pagliacci), Chou-en-Lai (Nixon in China) and Prince Yamadori in Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly.
In the U.S. he has appeared regularly at the Philadelphia Opera where his roles include Ford (Falstaff), Germont Pere (La Traviata), the title role in Gianni Schicchi and most recently Papageno (Die Zauberflöte). He has also sung Guglielmo (Così fan tutte) in Santa Fe.
Recent concerts include the New York Philharmonic with Thomas Adès (Totentanz), Rotterdam Philharmonic and James Gaffigan (A Sea Symphony), the Kammerorchester Basel and Paul Goodwin (Messiah), the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (Stravinsky Canticles), Orchestre Dijon Bourgogne and Gergely Madaras (Brahms Requiem), Helsinki Philharmonic, CBSO and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic with John Storgards (Belshazzar’s Feast), and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Andrew Manze (A Sea Symphony).
A keen recitalist, he has sung in New York at Carnegie’s Weill Hall; at Wigmore Hall and St John’s Smith Square in London; at the Oxford Lieder Festival and Buxton Festivals.
Robin de Raaff
was born on December 5, 1968 in Breda, the Netherlands. He was raised in a very musical family where classical music and popular music were part of his daily life. As a child he received weekly piano lessons from his father and practised daily. De Raaff discovered his own musical world through playing the bass guitar, which he taught himself to play. As a teenager, under the explosive influence of fretless bass guitar legend Jaco Pastorius, De Raaff switched to fretless bass guitar, introducing him to a new world of complex instrumental music, and ultimately Jazz.
But even more passionately, already as a young teenager, composing his own music was his most important musical expression. Starting with pop songs, with ever increasing instrumental parts, larger symphonic proportions were soon imposed which inevitably lead him towards the great classical composers. Inspired by this newly discovered music De Raaff developed a musical style for symphony orchestra installing the necessity to compose in full score. After enrolling as a composition student at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Amsterdam, playing the bass guitar moved to the background, but his very broad musical interest would greatly influence his view on style in contemporary Classical music.
De Raaff first studied composition with Geert van Keulen and later with Theo Loevendie, with whom he graduated cum laude in 1997. In 1999 De Raaff had the special privilege of being invited to work as George Benjamin’s only composition student at the Royal College of Music in London where he also studied with Julian Anderson.
Since 2001 De Raaff has been a professor of composition and orchestration and an active faculty member at the Composition Department of the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music (Codarts)
