Elina Albach began playing the harpsichord as a five-year-old. Coming from a very musical family with backgrounds in baroque and church music, she became familiar with that repertoire from an early age. This had profound consequences for her musical development: maybe being so deeply soaked into historical performance practice and the diverse musical languages of that era allowed her to think of it in completely new and risky ways: Not only is Albach in international demand as a harpsichordist today and the winner of many awards, but her agile ensemble CONTINUUM, which she founded and leads, is also considered the nucleus of an approach to early music that is fresh and innovative.
Elina Albach, born in 1990, studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with Prof. Jörg-Andreas Bötticher, has conducted the Vokalconsort Berlin, the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic and taught chamber music, basso continuo and harpsichord at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden and the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. She has performed in various ensembles and solo at countless renowned festivals and concert houses on four continents. Among her numerous scholarships the Fellowship #bebeethoven by PODIUM Esslingen and the German Federal Cultural Foundation stood out most recently, enabling young artists to find new paths in performance practice, interpretation and composition in 2017-2021. During this time, CONTINUUM created projects that explored new ways of performing and presenting early music, exciting combinations of early and contemporary music with the development of new repertoire for baroque instruments and innovative concert design. In 2022, Elina Albach was invited to curate and design the residency “Younger than Jesus” with four concerts at the prestigious MA Festival in Brugge.
At present, she is working above all on reimagining canonised works of the Baroque period in intens new contexts and miniature condensations. The performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion for tenor alone (Benedikt Kristjánsson), percussion (Philipp Lamprecht), organ and harpsichord, which was recorded in Leipzig’s empty Thomanerkirche on Good Friday 2020, at the peak of the first Covid-lockdown, was particularly enchanting and attracted attention of millions around the globe. Already in 2019, this production received the OPUS Klassik award for the most innovative concert.