Organist, pianist and conductor – Wayne Marshall is a musical multi-talent. In June 2021, the Briton thrilled the Berlin audience at the Waldbühne concert not only as soloist in George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but also for the first time as conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker. He had already performed several times with the orchestra as a pianist, for example in September 2012 in Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle.
As an organist, he is particularly fond of the French Romantics, and at the piano he can often be heard playing works by Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. But Wayne Marshall is not only at home in classical music. He has a broad, genre-spanning repertoire and is also an enthusiastic jazz musician. Last but not least, Wayne Marshall has earned a reputation as an imaginative improviser.
Raised near Manchester, Marshall initially trained as an organist at London’s Royal College of Music and in Vienna. The music of Gershwin, with its rhythms and oscillation between classical and jazz, has fascinated him since childhood; a performance of Porgy and Bess at Glyndebourne then also awakened his interest in conducting.
Today Marshall performs worldwide with organ recitals and piano recitals, but also as a concert soloist and conductor of leading orchestras in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA. He has served as Organist in Residence at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester and has performed regularly at the London Proms. From 2014 to 2020 he was principal conductor of the WDR Funkhausorchester. He has also conducted the philharmonic orchestras in Rotterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen, the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, among others.
In today’s concert, he now makes his debut at the organ of the Philharmonie Berlin – with a programme in which he juxtaposes French and German works of the late Romantic period.
