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The concert and opera singer Thomas Thomaschke comes from a Saxon family of church musicians. He studied voice at the Dresden Academy of Music as well as lieder interpretation under Kammersänger Prof. Anton Dermota in Vienna.
The bass singer is the prizewinner of numerous major international singing contests such as the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the s’Hertogenbosch Competition in the Netherlands, and the Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau.
After his sensational debut as Hunding in Richard Wagner’s Valkyrie at the Milanese Scala, where he would later perform Mozart, Thomaschke has been a guest performer at every major European opera house, among others the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Vienna State Opera, the Covent Garden Opera in London and the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, as well as worldwide at opera houses in Dresden, Zurich, Lisbon, Madrid, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rome, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Oslo, Prague, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv and Cape Town. At international festivals – in Glyndebourne or Edinburgh, at the Prague Spring Festival, the Maggio Musicale in Florence, or the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad to name a few – his preferred repertoire is Mozart. For many years he sang as first solo bass at the Leipzig Opera and Cologne Opera.
Apart from his dazzling stage presence in the Mozart roles of Sarastro, Osmin, Figaro and Don Giovanni, his singing career has likewise included the lyrical bass repertoire of Wagner, in particular, the landgrave in Tannhäuser, Gurnemanz in Parsifal, Pogner in the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, as well as the great bass roles of opera. Thomas Thomaschke is internationally renowned as a concert and lieder singer as well. His exceptional coloratura predestined him above all as a singer of Handel and Bach.
He has performed under directors such as Sawallisch, Haitink, Giulini, Leitner, Menuhin, Chailly, Pritchard, Patané, Maazel, Masur, Barenboim, Harnoncourt, Gardiner, Christi and Schreier. Moreover, the bass singer conducts international master classes for voice and is active as a jury member at international vocal contests. Since 2005, he teaches at the Academy of Music in Dresden. He was appointed the artistic director of the “Festival Mitte Europa” in 1992, which for seven weeks each year brings together Saxony, Bavaria and the Czech Republic with its program of cultural events and is widely considered the most important cultural project between Germany and the Czech Republic. |
Ivana Thomaschke-Vondráková was born in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia. She got her degree in Slavonic studies and art history at the renowned Charles University in Prague.
While still a student she married the German concert and opera singer Thomas Thomaschke. After receiving her doctorate in art history in 1965 she moved to East Germany, where she worked as a research associate at the National Galleries in Dresden and served as director of the department “Painting in the Second Half of the Nineteenth and the First Half of the Twentieth Century.”
In 1976 she emigrated to West Germany with her husband and two children for political reasons. In Cologne she freelanced as an art historian. She worked for several German museums and galleries (e.g., the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne and the Villa Merkel Gallery in Esslingen), was the author of artist catalogs and catalogs of works (e.g., Hermann Glöckner and Milan Kunc) and took part, in particular, in organizing German-Czech cultural projects.
Mrs. Thomaschke was one of the founding members of the German-German and German-Czech association “Mißlareuth 1990. Mitte Europa e.V.” in 1990. On behalf of the society she has helped run the international cultural project “Festival Mitte Europa, Bavaria · Bohemia · Saxony” since 1991. In her role as coordinator for the area of fine arts she is responsible for exhibitions, installations and symposia, as well as cooperation with the Czech Republic.
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