See video review on the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with 5000 singers in Tokyo (click here)

Latest review about the first concert of the season "Famous Men – Powerful Women" (Ethel Smyth: The Prison and Johannes Brahms: Nänie and Schicksalslied) written by Roz Trübcher click here.

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Kerstin Behnke is artistic director of the Berliner Cappella, the chamber choir Tonikum, and the vocal quintet shepherds and nymphs, in which she also sings. She works with numerous orchestras, such as Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg, the Brandenburger Symphoniker, and the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester.

One focus of Kerstin Behnke’s work as a conductor is on linking musical and extra-musical material thematically, thereby establishing new connections and making them accessible to experience. The venues are integral parts of the events: outside the concert hall, music enters into dialogue with its new surroundings; in the concert hall, extra-musical elements lead beyond the traditional boundaries of a musical performance.

A particular concern of Kerstin Behnke is to revive forgotten works by female composers and to make them known to a wider audience. Thus she conducted, for example, the world premiere of the orchestral version of Lili Boulanger’s “Hymne au Soleil,” reconstructed by the Berlin composer Oliver Korte. In March 2006, she brought Ethel Smyth’s opera “The Forest” back into the concert hall, an opera that has not been performed in Berlin for more than 100 years (see “Pressespiegel”). At the moment she is in the process of founding the society colle donne, which aims at arousing public interest in women composers.

Numerous premieres, the Berliner Cappella’s annual composition award, and the continual inclusion of compositions from the second half of the 20th century in her concert programmes testify to Kerstin Behnke’s interest in contemporary music.