Folkert Uhde

Folkert Uhde, a cultural manager and concert designer who lives in Berlin and Potsdam, grew up in the North Sea town of Wilhelmshaven with music by Bach and Schütz in the best Protestant choir tradition. After training as a radio and television technician, he studied communication and musicology at the Technical University of Berlin and baroque violin at the Academy for Early Music in Bremen. He worked as a freelance musician until 1995, the same year he set up his own business as a music and project manager.
From 1997 to 2012, Folkert Uhde was co-owner of Uhde & Harckensee MusikManagement, and from 1997 to 2008 he worked as manager and dramaturge for the internationally renowned Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin baroque orchestra.
 

He initiated, programmed and organized several concert series and festivals, including the “Biennale Alter Musik Zeitfenster” in collaboration with the Konzerthaus Berlin since 2002.
The international co-production of the opera “Dido & Aeneas” by choreographer Sasha Waltz marked the beginning of his collaboration with dramaturge and cultural manager Jochen Sandig, with whom he founded the now internationally established RADIALSYSTEM V as a “New Space for the Arts in Berlin” in 2006.

Since then, Folkert Uhde has made a name for himself primarily with the creative development and realization of new artistic formats and projects, especially for the performance of classical music in the broadest sense: he has developed and produced film and television productions in the field of classical music for ARTE, 3SAT and ZDF.Kultur.
 

In 2009, he was named “Cultural Manager of the Year” for his “innovative approach” in connection with RADIALSYSTEM V.
 

Folkert Uhde is a member of the teaching team of the “Concerto 21” program initiated by the Alfred Töpfer Foundation in Hamburg and is committed to the artistic development and establishment of young ensembles and soloists. Folkert Uhde also teaches at the Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen and the Nuremberg University of Music and regularly gives lectures and master classes.
 

In 2012/2013, he worked as a concert designer with the “Dialoge” festival of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg. In 2013, he was appointed artistic director of the traditional festival “Internationale Orgelwoche Nürnberg - Musica Sacra” and in 2015, together with the Bregenz congress designer Hans-Joachim Gögl, he was commissioned by the Montforthaus and the city of Feldkirch in Vorarlberg/Austria to develop and implement a profile-defining lighthouse performance. This series presents innovative formats between music and dialog on three weekends a year under the title “Zwischentöne”.
 

At the beginning of 2015, Folkert Uhde took over the directorship of the Köthen Bach Festival from Hans-Georg Schäfer, the former artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and long-time director of the Ansbach Bach Festival.
 

The term “concert design”, introduced by Folkert Uhde to describe the comprehensive reorganization of concert content and concert sequences in response to the rapidly changing social conditions, has become established in the public discourse on the future of classical music.
 

Folkert Uhde is a passionate European and is involved in the “Musicians 4 United Europe” initiative launched by the Berlin cellist Alban Gerhardt.