The Austrian conductor, lutenist, harpist and composer Christina Pluhar is one of the most innovative musicians on the early music scene. Through her interpretations and arrangements, she has broken from routine historical performance practice and given 17th-century music a new vibrancy.
She initially worked as a soloist and basso continuo player with ensembles such as Il Giardino Armonico, Hespèrion XXI and Les Musiciens du Louvre. From 1997 to 2005 she was an assistant to Ivor Bolton, working at venues including the Bavarian State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Paris Opéra and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.
In 2000 she founded the ensemble L’Arpeggiata, with which she has since performed regularly at renowned concert halls and international festivals, making Baroque repertory accessible to a wide audience. In 2012 L’Arpeggiata was the first early music ensemble to have a residency at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In 2025/26 she and L’Arpeggiata have performed at venues including the MusikTheater an der Wien and the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. Later in the year they will appear at the Berlin State Opera in Cavalli’s La Calisto, as part of the Barocktage 2026.
Recent highlights have included Handel’s Belshazzar in 2023 at the MusikTheater an der Wien, and Mozart’s Il re pastore and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Salzburg Mozartwoche in 2022 and 2025 respectively. Earlier highlights included recordings of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo, Luigi Rossi’s Il palazzo incantato with the puppeteer Mimmo Cuticchio, the commissioned work Orfeo Chamán in Bogotá, the dance piece Music for a While with the choreographer Mei Hong Lin, which received the Austrian Music Theatre Prize, and the first modern revival of Georg Caspar Schürmann’s Die getreue Alceste (1719) at the Rokokotheater in Schwetzingen.
Her extensive discography with L’Arpeggiata, released by the labels Alpha, Naïve and Erato / Warner Classics, has won numerous awards. In 2009, 2010 and 2011 Christina Pluhar was honoured with the ECHO Klassik Award, and in 2018 her ensemble received the OPUS Klassik Award.
Christina Pluhar was born in Graz in 1965, and initially learnt concert guitar and lute, going on to study early music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and Baroque harp at the Scuola Civica in Milan. Since 1999 she has taught Baroque harp at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.
