Marc-Olivier Oetterli Gear - UK

The Swiss bass baritone Marc-Olivier Oetterli, known for his “warm timbre” and “passionate stage presence” is also an established conductor. As music director for several concert choirs in Switzerland, he has conducted nearly one hundred concerts, representing a broad range of repertoire for orchestra, choir, and opera in concert version. As a soloist he has performed hundreds of live concerts and oratorios including the Bach passions, cantatas, the oratorios by Haydn, Mendelssohn, and many more. His other passion is flying. He has successfully trained dozens of pilots and has been known to make a last minute performance by personal air taxi.

"One of my most vivid memories is the experience I had of my first contact with an orchestra. After months of preparation as a soprano in a boys choir for the Bach Christmas Oratorio, came the day for the first rehearsal with orchestra. The multifaceted sound of the instruments captured my attention deeply and forever. I could never have imagined (even from a recording) this rich and overwhelming sound surrounding my soprano voice. Ever since I have been fascinated with the sound of the orchestra. This first contact with an orchestra as an 11 year old was for me an experience beyond words. Bernstein wrote about this:

“And the most wonderful thing of all is that there’s no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have. And some of those feelings are so special and so deep they can’t even be described in words. You see, we can’t always name the things we feel. Sometimes we can; we can say we feel joy, or pleasure, peacefulness, whatever, love, hate. But every once in a while we have feelings so deep and so special that we have no words for them and that’s where music is so marvelous; because music names them for us, only in notes instead of in words. It’s all in the way music moves — we must never forget that music is movement, always going somewhere, shifting and changing, and flowing, from one note to another; and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can.”

What a wonderful way to explain that music, sound is beyond words."—Marc-Olivier Oetterli

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