Volker Hedtfeld

When a spark ignites, Volker Hedtfeld is in his element. "It is sublime to sense when something happens between me and the choir," says the Dortmund native. He knows that a spark between a choir and its conductor will ignite in the audience too, electrifying it and triggering an emotional response. His passion for music is almost as old as he is. While still a child, he learned to play not only the piano, but also the organ, violin, and viola. Later he studied music education at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, but it was working with voices that excited him the most. In the late 1990s he founded his first vocal ensemble, Opus 99, with which he performed concerts in the Ruhr Valley and in the Rhineland. Before long he turned up at Berlin's University of the Arts (UdK), where he studied orchestral conducting with Lutz Köhler. Later he supplemented his education at the University of the Arts at the Ecumenical Institute of Sacred Music and studied choral conducting with Jörg- Peter Weigle at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin.