Events Archive 2022
Lisa Morgenstern
Lisa Morgenstern is a German / Bulgarian pianist, singer and composer. Her current Album Chameleon (2019) finds her taking dramatic strides to expand her range, matching her far-sighted approach to both synths and piano with her background in classical music. Recorded in collaboration with Berlin based, Argentinian producer and cellist Sebastian Plano, Chameleon’s nine ambitious tracks showcase her extraordinary, multi-octave-spanning voice on a collection that combines glacial elegance (‘Atlas’), baroque synth-pop (‘My Boat’), poignantly atmospheric electronica (‘Levitation’) and expressive piano instrumentals (‘Codex’).
Lisa has simultaneously made a name for herself with the variety of her collaborations. During the pandemic, she was hired to co-compose the score to one of Netflix’s forthcoming priority drama series, and additional studio collaborations with Casper, Balmorhea and Aukai have emerged since Chameleon’s release. Live shows with the renowned women’s Bulgarian Voices Berlin choir and, separately, the Munich Radio Orchestra meanwhile won further acclaim, with both institutions subsequently crucial to Morgenstern’s upcoming album, for which she also wrote the complex arrangements.
Her broad tastes no doubt have something to do with her upbringing as the independently-minded daughter of two orchestral musicians, one German, one Bulgarian. She began playing piano aged 5 before embarking on a promising ballet career, but when this was prematurely cut short by injury at the age of 15, she returned again to writing and performing music. A lingering love of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky was tempered by a youthful passion for punk, metal and, later, goth, and though it might be presumptuous to point to individual instances, each of these – along with a robust hunger for all sorts of other music, whether older or more contemporary – has in some way coloured her work since.