ABOUT.

Berlin-based composer, singer, pianist, arranger and vintage synth devotee Lisa Morgenstern first came to public attention in 2019 with the self-released Chameleon, “a striking, singular mix,” Britain’s Uncut magazine enthused, “of the ethereal and the earthly.” She’s since played headline shows across Europe and opened for the likes of Ólafur Arnalds, Joep Beving and Max Cooper, as well as appearing at festivals – including Iceland’s Airwaves, America’s South by South West and Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival – and in prestigious venues, among them Berlin’s Philharmonie and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.

In 2022, Morgenstern was hired to co-compose the score for THE EMPRESS (DIE KAISERIN), which went on to become NETFLIX’s then most-watched non-English language series and later earned an Int. EMMY for Best Drama Series. She has just completed work on its second season, for which she is also vocalist, pianist, and arranger, and again led the recording sessions with the Reykjavík Orchestra in Iceland’s celebrated Harpa Hall. In addition, she composed her first solo film score for 2024’s VON UNS WIRD ES KEINER SEIN, produced by WARNER BROTHERS ITVP / Chromosom Film for Germany’s ZDF/ARTE, while its director, Simon Ostermann, has invited her to work on his next, yet to be announced project.

During her career, Morgenstern has collaborated with other acclaimed artists including Casper, Balmorhea, Aukai and Ben Lukas Boysen, as well as with the Munich Radio Orchestra (for a nationally televised live performance at the 2019 Puls Festival) and the renowned Bulgarian Voices Berlin choir. The latter were recently awarded first place in the World Choral Cup’s 2024 Chamber Choir category for a performance in which she not only took part but which included pieces she had written and arranged. Both the choir and the Munich Radio Orchestra are featured prominently on Morgenstern’s upcoming album, for which she has written the complex arrangements.

Morgenstern’s broad tastes no doubt have something to do with her upbringing as the independently-minded daughter of two orchestral musicians, one German, one Bulgarian. She began playing piano aged 5 before embarking on a promising ballet career, but when this was prematurely cut short by injury at the age of 15, she returned again to writing and performing music. A lingering love of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky was tempered by a youthful passion for punk, metal and, later, goth, and though it might be presumptuous to point to individual instances, each of these – along with a robust hunger for all sorts of other music, whether older or more contemporary – has in some way coloured her work since.

The forthcoming album, however, eclipses Morgenstern’s earlier work, as well as that of many of her contemporaries, by looking back to her roots with as much innovation and enthusiasm as it looks forward to the future. Incorporating a voice that’s haunting, compassionate and remarkably versatile into icy synth soundscapes, intense orchestral arrangements, delicate piano melodies and even the folk of her ancestors, it pursues a variety of associated yet rarely trodden paths to devise a dreamlike album of bold invention, sweeping drama and striking intimacy.

Wyndham Wallace, 2024