Biography
In 2003, a year before completing his schooling, he carried off the second prize at the renowned international music competition of the ARD broadcasting network in Munich and was the joint winner of the Maurice André competition in Paris, after having won other important contests, such as the Prague Spring Festival (2003), the Timofei Dokschitzer Competition in Vilnius (2002), the Concertino Praga (2001) and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory Competition in Moscow (1997). In addition, he was awarded European Culture Prizes in Munich in 1999 and in Berlin in 2002.Giuliano Sommerhalder studied with Pierluigi Salvi at the Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" in Como and with Max Sommerhalder at the Detmold College of Music. He also gleaned important stimulus from Maurice André, Eric Aubier, Stephen Burns, Edward Carroll, Hans Gansch, Pierre Thibaud, James Thompson and others. He played in Claudio Abbado's Orchestra Mozart in Bologna in 2004, was chosen by Lorin Maazel as solo trumpeter for his Orquestra del Palau de les Arts "Reina Sofía" in Valencia, and since 2006 has been solo trumpeter in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly and a member of the brass quintet Italian WonderBrass. In 2008 he was accepted into the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.
As a soloist on both modern and historical instruments, Giuliano Sommerhalder has appeared throughout Europe, in America and Asia, at the Vienna Musikverein (where he played Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto), the Berlin Philharmonie and other important venues, at the Lucerne Festival and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. He has performed as a soloist with ensembles such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester of Berlin, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the NDR Philharmonic Orchestra in Hanover, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, the Moscow Soloists, the Basle Chamber Orchestra, the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig, the Deutsche Radio-Philharmonie of Saarbrücken and the symphony orchestras of the Czech and Polish broadcasting corporations.
"Romantic Virtuosity", Sommerhalder's CD recording of 19th and early 20th century trumpet concertos, has recently been released.
