Through the Ages

Petri/Hannibal Duo

Michala Petri and Lars Hannibal have been performing as the Petri/Hannibal Duo since 1991 and have given approximately 2,000 concerts worldwide. They have appeared at leading festivals and in concert halls across Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and China.

These include prestigious venues such as the Lincoln Center in New York, the Southbank Centre and Wigmore Hall in London, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Seoul Arts Center, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and soon the Regentenbau in Bad Kissingen.

Their repertoire spans music from the early Renaissance through works of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, to contemporary compositions, many of which have been specifically written for the Petri/Hannibal Duo.

A concert with the Petri/Hannibal Duo is a journey into the fascinating world of popular classical music and contemporary works. With their extensive experience, they have developed a straightforward, informal, and highly engaging concert format. Through brief explanations, they guide the audience to understand and appreciate the unique qualities of each piece. Their program is quintessentially representative of the duo, encompassing music that has accompanied Petri and Hannibal throughout their 33 years of collaboration.

Michala Petri

Michala was born into a musical family and first picked up a recorder at the age of three. At eleven, she began studying under Professor Ferdinand Conrad at the State Academy of Music and Theatre in Hanover. At that time, the recorder was generally regarded as an instrument for early music.

However, through her parents, Michala was introduced to many of Denmark’s leading contemporary composers, including Danish avant-garde Fluxus artist Henning Christiansen, who composed “To play for a child” when she was just seven years old. To date, more than 150 works have been written for Michala by some of the most renowned composers of our time.

By the mid-1980s, the Baroque revival was in full swing, and Michala’s captivating charm, effortless virtuosity, and impeccable musicality earned her fans and admirers worldwide. A concert with the BBC in London at the age of 17 led to her first album with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. She later joined the RCA/BMG artist roster, where she recorded a groundbreaking series of albums with pianist and composer Keith Jarrett.

In late 2006, together with her long-time duo partner Lars Hannibal, she founded her own record label, OUR Recordings, to create more opportunities for releasing contemporary and distinctive albums. The label also provided a platform for one of Petri’s most important legacies: a cycle of modern concertos composed specifically to showcase the recorder as an orchestral solo instrument.

Her critically acclaimed recordings, including Chinese Recorder Concertos (another Grammy® nomination), English Recorder Concertos, Danish/Faroese Recorder Concertos, German/French Recorder Concertos (released in May 2016), and American Recorder Concertos (released in 2018), have introduced numerous new works into the concert repertoire.

Another facet of Petri’s unique approach to music-making is her long-standing collaboration with guitarist/lutenist Lars Hannibal. The Petri/Hannibal Duo gave their first concert in 1992.

With an extraordinarily diverse repertoire ranging from Greensleeves to newly composed originals, the duo’s warm relationship has delighted audiences year after year. The Petri/Hannibal Duo has performed over 2,000 concerts worldwide and released eight albums, including the award-winning Kreisler Inspirations, which received the German ECHO Prize.

Petri’s career has been marked by crossing boundaries and continuously seeking new ways to expand her musical horizons and foster creative dialogues with other genres and cultures. Her innovative collaborations include the genre-blending crossover/world music/indie album Going to Pieces – Without Falling Apart with renowned composer/trumpeter and patriarch of the Nordic jazz scene Palle Mikkelborg, and the extraordinary album Dialogue – East Meets West, featuring new works by five young Chinese and five young Danish composers, written specifically for Michala’s recorder and the Chinese xiao/dizi bamboo flutes, played by leading Chinese xiao player Chen Yue.

The album The Nightingale, recorded with the Danish National Vocal Ensemble under Stephen Layton, received Grammy® nominations and three ECHO KLASSIK awards.

As Michala remarked in a 1984 interview with the New York Times: “Times are changing; if you want to say something today, it takes a much stronger kind of statement.” Forty years later, her musical vision and voice are stronger than ever!

Michala Petri recorder
Lars Hannibal guitar

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SA, 31.5.25 | 11:00 – 13:00 | » Rossini-Saal | Duration: ca. 120 minutes | Concert with intermission

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Late Night 1
TRADE FAIR