Sabine Meyer

Born in Crailsheim, Baden-Württemberg, Meyer began playing the clarinet at an early age. Her first teacher was her father, also a clarinetist. She studied with Otto Hermann in Stuttgart and then with Hans Deinzer at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, along with her brother, clarinetist Wolfgang Meyer, and husband, clarinetist Reiner Wehle, who played later in the Munich Philharmonic.[2] She began her career as a member of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic, where her appointment as one of the orchestra's first female members caused controversy.[3] Herbert von Karajan, the orchestra's music director, hired Meyer in September 1982, but the players voted against her at the conclusion of her probation period by a vote of 73 to 4.[4] The orchestra insisted the reason was that her tone did not blend with the other members of the section, but other observers, including Karajan, believed that the true reason was her gender. In 1983, after nine months, Meyer left the orchestra to become a full-time solo clarinetist.[5]

Orchestras with which she has performed include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic. In addition, she performs regularly with the Radio Symphony Orchestras in Vienna, Basel, Warsaw, Prague, Turin, Budapest, Brussels and Copenhagen and with major orchestras in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland.

In addition to her work as a soloist, Sabine Meyer is a committed player of chamber music and plays all styles of classical music. She finds great value in continued long-term collaboration with other musicians. She was a member of the Trio di Clarone along with her brother and husband who have recorded many CDs.[6][7] In late 2006 she undertook a short tour with the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. A particularly notable performance in this tour was at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra on 5 December. Meyer and her wind quintet have worked as members of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with Claudio Abbado.[8]

By the 1990s, she had become a prominent solo clarinetist, recording regularly and exclusively for the EMI label. These include a CD of French music for Clarinet and Piano with Oleg Maisenberg, entitled French Recital. A disc of clarinet concertos by Ludwig Spohr and Franz Krommer was released in July 2007, for which she collaborated with her student Julian Bliss.

Based on her schedule, which is published on her website, it can be assumed that the artist has around 60 performances per year.

Meyer and her husband have two children and share a professorship at the Musikhochschule Lübeck, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, and live in Lübeck.[2] Some of her students have also made a name for themselves as soloists, for example the Israeli clarinetists Shirley Brill and Shelly Ezra and the Hungarian clarinetist Boglárka Pecze (all three live in Germany), the Belgian clarinetist Annelien Van Wauwe, the German clarinetist Sebastian Manz and the Japanese clarinetist Taira Kaneko.

Sabine Meyer plays the clarinet and basset clarinet in B♭ and A, as well as a basset horn in F, all made of grenadilla by Herbert Wurlitzer, and a clarinet in A made of boxwood, manufactured by Schwenk & Seggelke, which she mainly uses in chamber music.

In 1984 she had commissioned Wurlitzer to build a bassett clarinet (in A) for her, not a historical replica, but a modern hitherto only occasionally built instrument. Since then she has been playing the clarinet concerto by Mozart (and his clarinet quintet) in a reconstructed version, with passages set deeper again. Because of her fame, she made this almost forgotten member of the clarinet family, which is about 18 cm longer than the normal, to produce the lower notes C to E♭, known again. Her example was followed by other soloists, who decided to play the Mozart concerto back on the clarinet for which he composed it and on which his friend and lodger Anton Stadler premiered on 16 October 1791 in Prague. They use either a historical instrument or a replica of the Stadler clarinet or a modern basset clarinet.

• 1996 Award of the federal state of Lower Saxony for culture
• 1997 Member of the Free Academy of the Arts Hamburg
• 2001 Brahms Prize by the Brahms Society Schleswig-Holstein[9]
• 2004 Art Award of the Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein
• 2010 Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg[10]
• 2013 Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Cross of Merit 1st Class[11]
• various ECHO Klassik Prize, eight-time winner[12]

• 1983: Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major K.V. 581, with Philharmonia Quartet Berlin, Denon PSM 38C37-7038
• 1985-1986: Weber: Clarinet Concerto No. 1, Clarinet Concerto No. 2, Concertino, with Herbert Blomstedt and Dresden Staatskapelle, and Clarinet Quintet, with Jörg Faerber and Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn, EMI Classics 7243 5 67989 2 2.
• 1988: Mozart: Clarinet Quintet, with Wiener Streichsextett, EMI Classics 7243 5 67648 2 8.
• 1990: Mozart: Clarinet Concerto, Sinfonia concertante in E flat K. 297b, with Hans Vonk and Dresden Staatskapelle, EMI Classics 7243 5 66949 2 7.
• 1995: Carl Stamitz: Clarinet Concerto No. 1, Clarinet Concerto No. 7, Concerto for basset horn, Concerto for Clarinet and Bassoon, with Sergio Azzolini (Bassoon) and Iona Brown and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, EMI Classics 7243 5 55511 2 2.
• 1996: A Night at the Opera, with Franz Welser-Möst and Orchester der Oper Zürich, EMI Classics 7243 5 56137 2 1.
• 1999: Mozart: Clarinet Concerto, Debussy Premiere Rapsodie, Takemitsu Fantasma/Cantos, with Claudio Abbado and Berliner Philharmoniker, EMI Classics 7243 5 56832 2 9.
• 1999: Brahms: Clarinet Quintet, with Alban Berg Quartett, EMI Classics 7243 5 56759 2 7.
• 2007: Saint-Saëns: Clarinet Sonata, Poulenc: Clarinet Sonata, Devienne: Clarinet Sonata No. 1, Milhaud: Scaramouche, with Oleg Maisenberg, EMI Classics 0946 3 79787 2 6.
• 2007: Franz Krommer: Concerto for two clarinets, with Julian Bliss, Spohr: Clarinet Concerto No. 4, (Clarinet) and Kenneth Sillito and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, EMI Classics 0946 3 79786 2 7.
• 2007: Nielsen Clarinet Concerto, Wind Quintet, with Simon Rattle and Berliner Philharmoniker, EMI Classics 0946 3 94421 2 6.

There are a number of other CD recordings until 2017 that are listed on Sabine Meyer's website. Many of these recordings (more than 200 sentences) can be listened to online and free of charge from Amazon and others or downloaded as MP3 files for a fee. A smaller number of these recordings are also available on Spotify and Deezer. Labels are: EMI Classics, Warner Classis, Avi-music and Deutsche Grammophon.

There are no Blu-rays with her and there is only one DVD, the Mozart Quintet, played with the Hagen String Quartet. The artist is represented on YouTube with some videos and a series of sound recordings.

The artist lives with her husband in the old town of Lübeck. Her hobbies are cooking, reading, riding and horse breeding.[13]

Media related to Sabine Meyer at Wikimedia Commons

• Official website
• Literature by and about Sabine Meyer in the German National Library catalogue
• Sabine Meyer discography at Discogs
• William Osborne, "Art Is Just an Excuse: Gender Bias in International Orchestras"
• Interview with Sabine Meyer and Reiner Wehle, July 15, 1994
• Sabine Meyer Biografie at Salzburger Festspiele (in German)
• W. A. Mozart, Clarinet Quintet on YouTube
• W. A. Mozart, Clarinet Concerto, from Adagio (performed with basset clarinet) on YouTube
• Weber, First Clarinet Concerto, finale on YouTube