Raphaela Gromes
Biography
Raphaela Gromes captivates her audience with her technically brilliant, versatile and delightful play: “With the first sound she creates incredible intimacy, her performance being very private, not one note being just 'made'”, this is how the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” describes her appearance: “Gromes inspires with her bliss, pairs earthiness with feathery excursions….and creates moments of pure poetry.” Raphaela Gromes’ appearances with her duo partner at the piano, Julian Riem, are being celebrated as perfect duets. She released her highly praised first Sony Classical album “Serenata Italiana” with works by Italian late Romantic composers Julian Riem in 2017. The album achieved worldwide critical acclaim. Gromes´ second album „Hommage à Rossini“ (November 2018) and her third album with music by Jacques Offenbach, released in May 2019 for the 200th anniversary of the composer became bestsellers and received 5 star reviews. For the Offenbach album Raphaela Gromes and Julian Riem received the “Prize of the German Record Critics” and the Opus Klassik Award 2020. On “Richard Strauss – Cello Sonatas” , the fourth album (Feb 2020), Raphaela Gromes presented a world premiere recording, the original version of the Strauss Sonata op.6. The recording of “Romantic Cello Concertos” by Schumann and Klengel with RSB Berlin received a Diapason d´Or. “Imagination” will be released in fall 2021. Raphaela Gromes acts internationally as SOS Children’s Villages Ambassador and Ambassador for the José Carreras leukemia foundation.
Born in 1991, Raphaela Gromes starts taking cello-lessons at the age of four. Her first appearance as soloist was in 2005 with Friedrich Gulda’s cello-concerto and was highly acclaimed both by the audience and the press. At the age of 14 she took up her studies at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig as extraordinary student with Peter Bruns. She continued her studies in 2010 at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich with Wen-Sinn Yang, later on with Reinhard Latzko at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She received valuable input from the master classes with David Geringas, Yo-Yo Ma, Frans Helmerson, Natalia Gutman, Jens Peter Maintz, László Fenyö, Daniel Müller-Schott, Kristin von der Goltz, Wolfgang Boettcher, Anner Bylsma and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmid. Previous engagements include music festivals like the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Ludwigsburg Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival and the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival. Raphaela Gromes also performed in prestigious concert halls such as the Tonhalle Zurich, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Vienna Konzerthaus. In spring 2018, she made her debut in the USA with the Fort-Worth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya.
Raphaela Gromes has already won numerous prizes, among them the first prize in the Competition Richard Strauss, a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German National Merit Foundation), and the first prize in the cello solo competition of the German Music Council in 2016. In 2019 she was awarded the Prize of the German Record Critics for her Offenbach release and the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize. Raphaela Gromes’ cello was built by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in 1855 and is provided by a private benefactor.
Current album
Femmes
Artists Raphaela GromesRelease Date: 02/03/2023
For years the star cellist and Opus Klassik laureate Raphaela Gromes has taken up the cause of women composers. Three of her albums, acclaimed by critics and listeners alike, have featured music by unknown women composers, and she maintains a long-term working relationship with the “Frau und Musik” Archive in Frankfurt. So it is only natural that her new double album, FEMMES, should lend a voice to outstanding women from nine centuries of music history. No fewer than 23 woman composers found their way onto the double album, from Hildegard of Bingen to Clara Schumann all the way to Lera Auerbach and Billie Eilish, not to mention such famous operatic figures as Susanna from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro or Bizet’s Carmen.
“What about all the wonderful music we’ve missed over the centuries in a culture that continues, even today, to close its eyes to works by women?” This is the question posed by author Susanne Woszitzka in the accompanying booklet. After all, less than 2 per cent of the works programmed by Germany’s professional orchestras were written by women; and the “Donne – Frauen in der Musik” Foundation, in a study of 111 orchestras from 31 countries, arrived at a figure of only 7.7 per cent. A strange picture, considering that for centuries there have been extremely gifted women composers who left behind a multitude of thrilling compositions.
“A friend of mine suggested that I devote an album entirely to women composers”, Raphaela Gromes explains. “So I plunged into the research and was excited and shocked at once: excited by the incredible number of brilliant women composers at work all over the world since the Middle Ages, and shocked because I’d never heard of most of them.”
The conception of FEMMES was worked out in close cooperation with the “Frau und Musik” Archive, Furore Verlag (a publishing firm that issues only music by women composers) and Sony Classical. It quickly turned out to be a double album containing works by 23 women composers from all over the world. Some are already familiar, such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel or Nadia and Lili Boulanger. Others are genuine discoveries: the music of Princess Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria, the Jewish-Dutch composer Henriette Bosmans, Laura Netzel from Sweden, the Afro-American composers Dolores White and Florence Price or the contemporary composer Victoria Yagling. Several première recordings can be heard on FEMMES, such as Tre Momenti for cello and string orchestra by the Italian composer Matilde Capuis.
Accompanying Raphaela Gromes on FEMMES are the Festival Strings Lucerne and their artistic director Daniel Dodds, with whom she has maintained a long-standing working relationship, as well as the pianist Julian Riem, who also prepared all the arrangements on the album.
“With FEMMES”, Raphaela Gromes says of her new album, “I can at last make the works and life stories of these wonderful women accessible to a broad audience.” The album will be released by Sony Classical on 3 February.
