Tamar Halperin

Tamar Halperin, who grew up in Israel and initially pursued a career as a tennis player, studied music at the University of Tel Aviv before continuing her education at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. She completed her doctorate on Johann Sebastian Bach at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. Her repertoire spans five centuries and she has performed as a soloist with artists such as Laurence Cummings and Idan Raichel as well as with renowned orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the English Concert Baroque Orchestra in Europe, North America, Israel, Japan, Korea and Australia. As a harpsichordist and conductor, she has worked with ensembles such as the Podium Festival Orchestra, The English Concert and the Cape Town String Exchange Ensemble.
In addition to baroque music, which forms the center of her work, Halperin also devotes herself to contemporary repertoire. In collaboration with jazz pianist Michael Wollny, she recorded the highly acclaimed album Wunderkammer, which won the ECHO award for best piano album in 2010. The album Wunderkammer XXL was produced with Jim McNeely and the hr-Bigband. In 2012, she and her husband, countertenor Andreas Scholl, released the album Wanderer, which includes songs by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Brahms. On her album Satie, released in 2016, she isolates the voices of Erik Satie’s piano pieces and reassembles them, using instruments such as glockenspiel, Hammond organ, Wurlitzer and a computer in addition to the grand piano and harpsichord. In her BachSpace project, together with violinist Etienne Abelin and audio designer Tomek Kolczyński, she fuses Bach’s music with samples, loops and sounds created at the interface of baroque music and electronica.
Halperin has been married to the German opera singer Andreas Scholl since August 2012. A German-Israeli family encounter resulted in the joint album The Family Songbook in 2018, which includes songs from different cultural backgrounds. The album Twilight People followed in 2019.
Halperin has received numerous awards for her artistic achievements, including a scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation from 1998 to 2000, the honorary prize at the Van Vlaanderen Musica Antiqua Brugge Competition in 2004, the Presser Award in 2005, the REC Music Award in 2006 and the Eisen-Picard Performing Arts Award, which she received in 2006 and 2007. Her productions with Michael Wollny, which received the ECHO Jazz Award in 2010 and 2014, and the Hessian Culture Prize in 2016 (which she received together with Andreas Scholl), round off her honors.