Konstantia Gourzi, “Opus Klassik” award-winner as a Composer of the Year in 2023, has enriched contemporary music in a unique way for more than 30 years as a composer, conductor and university professor with her world-exploring sound cosmos and authentic language. In Konstantia Gourzi’s music, one experiences an inner glow and a great dramatic power that does not shout but comes from silence and centering. Her compositional work includes works for orchestra, chamber ensemble and solo pieces as well as music for music theater and film music. Gourzi repeatedly engages with social challenges and timeless natural themes: she feels an inner urge to transform these themes through the unique energy of music.

Konstantia Gourzi studied piano, composition and conducting in her home city of Athens and at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). She was influenced by composers such as György Kurtág, with whom she worked closely from 1991 to 1996, Isang Yun, Hans Werner Henze, Sofia Gubaidulina, Péter Eötvös, Aribert Reimann and Iannis Xenakis, and as well as by conductors, such as Claudio Abbado, whom she assisted with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1995, Carlos Kleiber, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Günter Wand, Sylvia Caduff and Michael Gielen. Since 1991, Konstantia Gourzi has founded and directed various ensembles, including attacca berlin, Ensemble Echo, ensemble oktopus and the network and ensemble opus21musikplus. She taught at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and has held a professorship for ensemble conducting at the Academy of Music and Theater in Munich since 2002.

Konstantia Gourzi’s clients include the BBC, the Bavarian State Opera, the Venice Biennale, the Grafenegg Festival, the Berlin State Opera, the Tonkünstler Orchestra, the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Bachchor Salzburg and the Lucerne Festival. She has composed for countless ensembles as well as for soloists such as Nils Mönkemeyer, Cathy Krier, Dorothee Oberlinger, Francois Leleux, Julian Prégardien, Danae and Kiveli Dörken and William Youn. Several albums with her music on ECM and Sony Classical, among others, have been nominated for the International Classical Music Awards and the German Record Critics’ Award. In the 2024/25 season, numerous premieres by Konstantia Gourzi will be performed in various countries. She also continues to work on new compositions and performs interdisciplinary new concert formats with her Munich ensemble oktopus.