Claudio Bohórquez

After a major prize win at the International Pablo Casals Cello Competition in 2000, cellist Claudio Bohórquez became an important presence on the concert scene in Germany and beyond. He is also a noted educator and in the 2000s and 2010s has enjoyed a growing recording career. Bohórquez was born in Gifhorn in north central Germany but grew up in the larger industrial city of Karlsruhe in the southwest. His father was Peruvian, his mother Uruguayan. When asked what was specifically Latin in his makeup, he has pointed to his long black hair. His first exposure to classical music came through opera; when a recording of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte was played, he would sing along from the booklet. He took up the cello at eight, and soon after that he and a friend were challenged to drop their practicing and join their cohorts on the soccer field. They refused, and the friend, Jesús Castro-Balbi, also became a successful cellist. Bohórquez made rapid progress and studied in turn with David Geringas at the Musikhochschule Lübeck, with Hans-Christian Schweiker at the University of Aacent, and with Boris Pergamenschikow at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne and the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin. His win at the Pablo Casals Competition was preceded by other strong competition showings, including those at the Tchaikovsky Youth Competition in Moscow and the Rostropovich Competition in Paris. Bohórquez has appeared as a concerto soloist with many major German orchestras, including the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Many of his appearances abroad have been in the U.S.; these have included concerts with the Detroit and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Bohórquez has also appeared at numerous festivals in Europe and the New World, including the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. He taught at the Hanns Eisler Academy from 2003 to 2006, and joined the faculty of the Stuttgart Music Academy as professor in 2011. In 2004, Bohórquez appeared with the Dresden Philharmonic and conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos in a Berlin Classics recording of Richard Strauss' Don Quixote. After albums for the Avanti Classic and Alpha labels, he returned to Berlin Classics, releasing an album of Brahms' two cello sonatas with pianist Péter Nagy in 2018. He is the artistic director of Germany's Winnenden Festival. ~ James Manheim