Maximilian Ehrhardt is part of the new generation of performers of the historical harp renowned for his blend of virtuosity, scholarly inquiry, and innovative concert programming.
In 2024 he performed with Concerto Copenhagen Handel’s Saul at the Royal opera in Copenhagen, played four concerts in Bolivia during the Festival Misiones de Chiquitos and will tour internationally with Christina Pluhar’s L’Arpeggiata. At the same time he is realising his own projects: He will publish a CD of new compositions especially made for him together with seventeenth-century works, which will be published on Carpe Diem Records (Outhere). He will also tour with his ensemble Société Lunaire and premiere his music theatre project DODO in Berlin.
Maximilian studied modern harp with Erika Waardenburg at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and historical harps with Mara Galassi at the Accademia Internazionale della Musica di Milano, graduating with distinction. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate at the docARTES programme in Gent / KU Leuven where he focuses on the performance practice of the harp concerto in the 18th century.
He performed amongst others with Concerto Copenhagen, L’Arpeggiata, Collegium 1704, the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Concerto Köln, the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble, the Wroclaw Baroque Ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques and the Choeur de Chambre de Namur. He worked with conductors such as Kent Nagano, Christina Pluhar, Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Konrad Junghänel, Lorenzo Ghielmi and Leonardo García Alarcón. Performances led him, amongst others, to the early music festivals in Berlin, Bucharest, Copenhagen, Utrecht, Trondheim, Innsbruck, Ambronay, Namur as well as the Festival della Valle d’Itria, Wratislavia Cantans and the MITO SettembreMusica Festival in Milan.
Maximilian has recorded many CDs and was nominated for his duo CD Viola Appassionata (2017) for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the International Classical Music Award. He has performed live on Radio Rai3, Radio Klara (Belgium), the classical music stations of Hungary, Poland and Denmark, Concertzender Nederland, Bayerischer Rundfunk and France Musique. His first solo recording with Welsh music from the 18th century in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk Kultur was released in 2020 on Carpe Diem Records. In 2023 he published a CD with world premiere recordings of Belgian quartets for harp and strings from the eighteenth century with his own ensemble Société Lunaire on the Belgian label Ramée in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
He is the artistic director of the Tage Alter Musik am Bodensee, a festival for early music in the Lake of Constance region, which he founded in 2016. He is a regular contributor for the national German radio Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
