Dieter Ammann

Dieter Ammann, born in 1962, grew up in a musical home. He received his first piano lessons at the age of five, and later added trumpet and bass. After graduating from high school, Dieter Ammann studied Music for schools/conducting in Lucerne and at the same time trained at the Swiss Jazz School in Bern. The 1980s and early 90s were marked by Europe-wide concert activity and recordings in the field of jazz/improvised music.

Dieter Ammann then studied theory/composition at the Basel Music Academy with Roland Moser and Detlev Müller-Siemens and took courses with Witold Lutosławski, Wolfgang Rihm, Dieter Schnebel and Niccolò Castiglioni. At the age of 30, Dieter Ammann turned to composing.

Ammann takes a lot of time in preparing his scores. He has received numerous national and international awards for his meticulously notated chamber music and orchestral works, including the Kompositionspreis der Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, the first prize of the IBLA Foundation in New York (“In honour of Luciano Berio”), the Schweizer Musikpreis and the Kunstpreis der AZ Medien.

He is now considered the most renowned Swiss composer of the middle generation and is also a sought-after lecturer. He leads a composition class at the Lucerne School of Music and lectures at the Bern University of the Arts. Master classes have taken him to the universities of Cologne, Weimar, Karlsruhe, St. Petersburg, New York University, Rosario and La Plata, among others.

Invitations as composer in residence have taken him to festivals such as the DAVOS FESTIVAL Young Artists in Concert, the Lucerne Festival, the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, the Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker and the St. Petersburg International New Music Festival.

In addition to renowned Swiss orchestras, performers of his works include the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra London and Mariinsky Orchestra, as well as Ensemble intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, Quatuor Diotima, conducted by Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, Valery Gergiev, Pablo Heras-Casado, Susanna Mälkki, Jonathan Nott, Sakari Oramo, Matthias Pintscher and Markus Stenz, among others.