ANDRES MUSTONEN
Andres Mustonen adolescent fascination with contemporary music made an about-face in the early 1970s towards early and Christian music. In 1972, it led to founding the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus. Since the founding of the ensemble, Hortus Musicus and Mr. Mustonen have been performing constantly on the world's concert stages and at music festivals: the Utrecht Festival, the Malmö Baroque, concerts in Prague, St. Petersburg and Moscow, performances at the Mozart-Fest in Chemnitz, the Jaffa Festival in Israel, the Lufthansa Baroque Festival in London, the Scottish Early Music Festival in Glasgow, the Lockenhaus Festival in Austria and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival. In these years, Mr. Mustonen and Hortus Musicus have succeeded in storing their work on 25 records. Mr. Mustonen is partly a solo violinist but mostly a conductor. He conducts several distinguished orchestras: the Great Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, the Moscow National Academic Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the Musica Viva Academic Chamber Orchestra, the national orchestras of Finland, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia and Lithuania, the Bayerische Rundfunken, the Helsinki City Orhestra, the Finnish Radio Syphony Orchestra. During many years, Andres Mustonen has worked together with the Tallinn Philharmonics and with the National Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Mustonen is in close creative contact with many Estonian composers – Erkki-Sven Tüür, Peeter Vähi, Galina Grigorjeva and Helena Tulv, also giving premieres of their new works. Mr. Mustonen's repertoire includes pieces of early music as well as of new music, which he often premieres.
