artists

Felix Hauptmann

Pianist - NICA artist since 2024
Felix Hauptmann © Inês Pizarro Correia

A unique, calm sound world: nothing must, anything goes.

Emphatic, sensitive and independent - pianist and composer Felix Hauptmann is constantly working on finding his own musical language and demonstrates it in his trio PERCUSSION, for example. Together with drummer Leif Berger and bassist Roger Kintopf, he has been exploring the paths of a shared aesthetic sensibility since 2020. His compositions are characterised by a subtle balance between structure and freedom, paying particular attention to tonal colours and rhythmic complexity.

As Concerto Magazine writes: ‘Hauptmann, bassist Roger Kintopf and drummer Leif Berger succeed in making their sophisticated, harmonically and metrically unbound music sound as if freely improvised. This highly concentrated and organically pulsating compositional distillate unleashes unexpected associations and astounds with its sheer purposelessness: nothing must, but everything can.’

In 2024, Hauptmann was part of the City of Munich’s artist-in-residence programme at Villa Waldberta in Feldafing for three months and also used this time to work on his new project SERPENTINE. Hauptmann began his musical career as a junior student at the Saar University of Music, where he studied jazz piano from 2010 to 2012. His studies then took him to the Cologne University of Music and Dance, where he further refined his compositional style. Felix Hauptmann has been a lecturer in jazz piano at the University of Wuppertal since 2019 and incorporates his artistic expertise into his teaching.

From 2018 to 2023, Hauptmann was involved in curating the concert series ‘junges loft’, which has developed into an important forum for the young Cologne jazz scene and offers a platform for innovative and experimental musicians. As a ‘contemporary rediscoverer of the analogue synthesizer’, he skilfully interweaves electronic and acoustic sounds in his works, opening up new musical horizons over and over again.

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