Daniel Grossmann | Conductor

DANIEL GROSSMANN has spent his entire professional life searching for the place of Jewish culture in the collective consciousness and contributing to intercultural dialogue by communicating this culture. With these issues in mind, the conductor founded the JEWISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA MUNICH (first as Orchestra Jakobsplatz Munich) in 2005. Since then he has built the orchestra into an internationally recognised professional ensemble performing at the highest musical level.  He has also developed a profile for the JCOM that stands out with its unusual projects even in the rich Munich cultural life.

DANIEL GROSSMANN focuses on projects for today, the here and now, not on retrospective views. He has initiated performances of almost-forgotten Offenbach one-acters with video projections and put a new edition of the 1920’s cinema varieté on stage with new compositions for silent films by young film composers.  He is currently involved in expanding the international audience of JCOM through the launch of its own YouTube channel with professional sound and video recordings of the highest quality.

Of course the activities of the artistic director of JCOM involve forgotten, persecuted and silenced Jewish 20th-century composers.  In the series ‘Expeditions’ in the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, the skilled speaker and researcher DANIEL GROSSMANN presents largely unknown composers and their works. In 2019 he organized the only festival for Mieczysław Weinberg’s 100th birthday. Together with the composer Moritz Gagern he searched for the roots of klezmer music; the result of a year of research was a new full-length klezmer composition that has nothing in common with the kitschy image of this Jewish Eastern European folk music.

As recognition for his tireless work in cultural communication, Daniel Grossmann was awarded the ‘Pro meritis scientiae et litterarum’ prize by the Bavarian Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts in 2012.

DANIEL GROSSMANN was born to a Jewish-Hungarian family in 1978 in Munich, Germany, where he lives. He began his conducting studies in his hometown with Hans-Rudolf Zöbeley; he then studied at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City with Scott Bergeson and at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest with Ervin Lukács. His extensive discography includes Jewish composers like Viktor Ullmann, Paul Ben-Haim and Marc Neikrug as well as works by Iannis Xenakis, John Cage and Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony.