Gareth Lubbe
Viola
South African born violist and overtone singer, Gareth Lubbe, appears as soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe, America, Africa and Asia. From 2007 until 2014 he was principal violist of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig under the baton of Riccardo Chailly.
Other than appearances on the worlds foremost stages such as the Berlin Philharmonie, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, London Wigmore Hall and New York Carnegie Hall, Gareth also appears as regular artist and educator at leading festivals in Finland, England, South Korea, Japan and Brazil amongst others. He is on the international faculty of the annual Chamber Music Festival in Stellenbosch which brings together up to 400 young students from across Africa and other parts of the world. As a regular member of the “Spectrum Concerts Berlin” he performs regularly with Boris Brovtsyn, Torleif Thedeen and Jens Peter Mainz amongst others. Other chamber music partners of past and present include Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky, Daishin Kashimoto, Claudio Bohorquez and Liza Ferschtmann.
In 2013 he accepted the post of Professor at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen where he has a studio of international viola students.
As an acclaimed overtone singer, Gareth also gives performances and lectures around the world. Prominent composers have written works for his voice, and his vocal skills have been recorded for Radio, Films as well as computer games.
Gareth is very much at home in the world of improvisation. His duo album “Lubatov” (Leo Records) with the pianist Simon Nabatov displays his extraordinary fusion of overtone singing and viola. One of his annual highlights is performing on the ”compost organ” as member of the Agricultural Symphony at the ‘Stelzen Festspiele bei Reuth’ amongst the meadows and fields of the Vogtland mountains of east Germany. Together with artistic director and multi- instrumentalist, Henry Schneider, as well as the sound artist Erwin Stache, Gareth uses the festival as a podium to unify all genres and styles of the arts and make music with any object from a spade to a cluster-assembly- milking machine.
In 1994, Gareth had the honour of performing at the presidential inauguration of Nelson Mandela in Pretoria. His devout love for the mother continent is sustained through his work on a social and cultural level. In 2019 he was appointed as International Ambassador for the “Denis Goldberg House of Hope”, a new arts and culture project in Cape Town, promoting social cohesion and life skills to the disadvantaged youth of South Africa.