Curriculum Vitae

The music of Aristides Strongylis is very narrative and always in close dialogue with other arts such as literature, theater, dance, and painting. Critics describe it as energetic, immediate, expressive. His works have been performed in major venues such as Athens' Megaron, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Munich Gasteig, Konzerthaus Berlin, as well as in Austria, Switzerland, France, and Spain. There has been an ongoing close co-operation with German broadcasting companies like Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), Saarländischer (SR) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR). The MDR Sinfonieorchester played Strongylis and several recordings have been co-produced by MDR, a CD-production of “playback play” for viola and organ amongst them. His second string quartet was presented in a radio feature and recorded as a co-production with Bayerischer Rundfunk.

Strongylis has composed pieces for friends and musicians like Hatto Beyerle, ensemble amarcord, the Iturriaga Quartet, and the violist Tatjana Masurenko. He has a close-knit relation to the Orchestra of Colours, the most distinguished Greek orchestra for contemporary music. His 2011 co-operation HEPTA – acoustic movement concert with the dance company EllaH received high acclaim and was performed over a dozen times, lastly at the Impuls Festival for new music in Sachsen-Anhalt.

Among his special interests is his award-winning compositorial work with children. Strongylis teaches “Composing with children“ at schools and has been a compositorial tutor at award-winning projects, such as the children’s theater project The Butterfly Work­shop (1st prize in the nationwide German com­petition Kinder zum Olymp!), Monsieur Mathieu – was wird?, a children’s choir project of the Leipzig opera with physically and socially challenged children (junge ohren preis 2010), and the music theater project Fighting the Tiger by Gewandhaus and Haus Steinstraße e.V. (1st price Kinder zum Olymp! 2011).

Aristides Strongylis was born in Athens (Greece) in 1974. He studied guitar and music theory in his home town and composition at the Leipzig Music Conservatory “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” with Siegfried Thiele and Dimitri Terzakis. Master classes on composition took him to Hungary, where he attended the “International Bartók Seminar” in Szómbathely with Martin Bresnick and Johannes Kretz, and to “Voix Nouvelles” at Royaumont (France) with Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey. Strongylis is a member of both the German and the Greek Composers' Union. His works are being published by Edition Gravis, Berlin.

→ CV as .pdf file