Esther Kretzinger’s work moves between performance, contemporary music, curating, producing and music education. Rooted in her classical background as a singer, her work has expanded, driven by a curiosity about different musical languages and the contexts in which music is experienced and shared. 

 

Musical Beginnings

Esther studied voice and music theatre at Mozarteum University Salzburg, graduating with distinction in 2008. She was awarded the Lilli Lehmann Medal by the International Mozarteum Foundation and received prizes at international competitions in Vienna, Graz and Hamburg, as well as First Prize at the Bundeswettbewerb Gesang Berlin. As a singer, she has appeared on opera and concert stages in Europe and beyond, including the Salzburg State Theatre, Festspielhaus Salzburg, Norwegian National Opera and Mainfranken Theater Würzburg, and has worked with conductors including Ivor Bolton, Peter Gülke, Markus Poschner, Ola Rudner and Sebastian Weigle. Her musical roots lie in Mozart, the First Viennese School and the classical repertoire; over time, her repertoire and artistic interests have expanded to Lied, music of the 20th and 21st centuries, contemporary performance, jazz, free improvisation and electronic music.

Recording has been part of this exploration from an early stage. Her debut album, Lieder im Volkston, released by Gramola Vienna in 2011 with pianist Andrej Hovrin, brought together music by Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, exploring the relationship between folk traditions and art song.

 

Roots & Places

Esther’s sense of place and history is closely connected to her own roots. Born into a Danube Swabian family in the Hungarian-speaking region of Satu Mare in Transylvania and raised in Bavarian Swabia, she grew up conscious of a history shaped by migration and the cultural traces of Central Europe. Studying in Austria brought her into renewed contact with this shared history and with the cultural landscape of the former Habsburg world, through music and architecture, but also through landscape, food and everyday culture.

Today, Esther lives and works between Berlin and Bavaria. The contrast between the two has become part of her perspective: the intensity, openness and constant movement of Berlin on one side; landscape, history and a different sense of time on the other. Both continue to influence the way she thinks about culture and develops artistic projects. Her growing passion for viticulture reflects the same interest in landscape, tradition and the culture that grows around a particular place.

 

Creating Contexts

In 2014, Esther founded the Weissenhorn Klassik Festival in the historic former Fugger town of Weißenhorn in Bavaria. What began as a small chamber music festival was built around a clear idea: rather than reproduce mainstream classical programming, she wanted to return chamber music to an intimate historical setting and create programmes shaped by musical relationships, ideas and narratives.

While much of her own work at the time took place in opera houses and concert halls, the festival offered another kind of artistic space, one in which she could search more deeply into the character and essence of music and shape not only its interpretation, but how it was experienced.

Initially both performer and curator, Esther increasingly focused on programming, artistic direction and developing new formats. Over twelve editions, Weissenhorn Klassik has welcomed artists from around the world, among them Avi Avital & Omer Klein, Barbara Dennerlein, Rohan de Saram, Juan José Mosalini and Quatuor Diotima, while retaining its focus on close listening and artistic depth.
 

Crossing Musical Boundaries

With Sound of a Poem, released by Gramola Vienna and issued as a limited-edition vinyl LP in 2018, Esther brought together late-Romantic and Impressionist song with jazz arrangements. Rather than approaching the repertoire through fixed historical or stylistic categories, the album grew from listening, musical instinct and the poetry itself, which became common ground between art song and jazz.

It reflected a conviction that had become increasingly important to her: that musical expression need not be defined by genre or period.

Sound of a Poem was conceived as a complete artistic concept rather than simply as documentation of repertoire.

In 2019, Sound of a Poem travelled to Taiwan, where Goodiscs presented the vinyl edition in Taoyuan in an evening combining electronic adaptations of the album, a live contribution by a local string quartet and exchange with the audience.

This interest in crossing musical boundaries took a more experimental direction with REER PROJECT, founded in Berlin in 2021 by Esther and violinist Georges-E. Schneider. Their Erik Satie: Vexations - Un Théâtre Acoustique, digitally released by the Belgian Off -Record Label in 2022, approached Satie not only through the repetitive nature of Vexations, but also through his relationship with absurdism, satire, nightlife and the avant-garde. The work layered avant-garde, jazz, techno and electroacoustic elements, combining voice, breath, spoken text and violin with analogue and digital processing. Texts associated with Satie’s self-founded “Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor” became part of a collage that took the original composition apart and placed it in an entirely new musical world.​

 

Masterclasses & Music Education

Alongside performing and curating, teaching has long been part of Esther’s work. She has given masterclasses and workshops in Europe and Asia, including at Taoyuan Municipal Wu-Ling Senior High School in Taiwan and the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing. In 2019, her teaching focused on Lied and chamber music; one participating student was subsequently invited to perform at Weissenhorn Klassik as part of a cooperation with the China Conservatory.

Over time, working with younger children opened another perspective. Esther became particularly drawn to the immediacy and curiosity with which primary-school children encounter sound and music, often without the expectations or boundaries that develop later. This experience led her to initiate a series of music education projects for primary and special-needs schools in Bavaria, which developed into Papageno Musik. Since 2025, the programme has been established independently, bringing professional musicians and different forms of musical expression directly into schools. Its aim is to give children direct experiences of music from an early age, regardless of background or previous access to culture, and to create encounters in which listening, curiosity and participation come first. For Esther, this is also about what music can do beyond the musical experience itself: connect, reduce barriers and create a sense of growing together.
 

Kulturhaltestelle & New Directions

In 2020, Esther co-founded Kulturhaltestelle, today an independent platform for cultural production, international festivals, music projects and dialogue, based in Berlin and Bavaria. It grew out of many of the strands that had shaped her work until then, bringing together curating, contemporary and experimental music, music education and international collaboration. Since 2026, Esther has served as its Managing Artistic Director, shaping its artistic direction, projects and partnerships. Looking ahead, Esther is developing freq.fest, a new festival in Berlin bringing contemporary music into dialogue with electronic and experimental practices. 

International exchange has become central to Esther’s work. Through Kulturhaltestelle’s involvement in the European Festivals Association, she is part of an active exchange with festival makers, artists and cultural organisations across Europe. She believes in connecting colleagues across borders, sharing experience and learning from one another, and in the role festivals and independent cultural initiatives can play in a strong and connected cultural Europe.

What connects these different strands is a belief in what music can make possible: curiosity, exchange and encounter, between people, experiences and different ways of listening. Listening together.