Bar Avni, a young, yet acclaimed Israeli conductor living in Germany is the 2021 recent awardee of the International Kurt-Masur-Institute Scholarship which gives profile support, an opportunity with the Halle Opera and concerts in the IMPULS Festival in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany in the next season.

                 

Ms. Avni is also appointed to a three-year term (2021-23) as Chief Conductor of the Bayer Philharmonic, the first female conductor in the orchestra's 111-year history. She will conduct concerts in Leverkusen and other cities in region of Dusseldorf and Cologne. Ms. Avni will conduct six programs a year, some repeated in several different venues. The orchestra is sponsored by Bayer Pharmaceuticals. 

                 

 Last year has included her conducting debuts with Camerata Hamburg in Elbphilharmonie, the Staatskapelle Halle orchestra and Halbersadt Philharmonie as part of the IMPULS Festival and the Israel Philharmonic in Charles Bronfman Hall, Tel Aviv.

                 

 After performing with the Gstaad Conducting Academy of the Yehudi Menuhin Festival with Maestro Jaap van Zweden and Professor Johannes Schläflie in 2018, Avni was nominated for the Neeme Järvi prize and invited to return to the 2019 Academy with Manfred Honeck.

                 

Her 2016 debut at the Tyrolean Festival Erl and following prize in the Fitelberg Conducting Competition Katowice, Poland had led to concerts with Sinfonia Varsovia and several other Polish orchestras. She has since worked with a wide breadth of orchestras, including the Israel chamber orchestra, Juventus Symphony Orchestra, Hamburger Symphony, Magdeburg Philharmonic and several others in Germany and Austria.

                 

 Bar Avni has led the successful production of the chamber opera "Simplicius Simplicissimus" by Karl A. Hartmann, a shortened version of the Opera Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell, and the German premiere of the Chinese short opera, based on the french film “L‘Accordeur”.

             

Bar Avni early career was performing as a classical percussionist in all the leading orchestras in Israel and she is a student of Yoav Talmi, Martin Sieghart and Ulrich Windfuhr. She then worked as the assistant conductor of both the Israel chamber orchestra under music director Yoav Talmi in season 2013-14, and the Bergische Symphoniker under music director Peter Kuhn in season 2017-18. There, she conducted and moderated many open-air and family concerts with great success.  She returned to perform with the orchestra in the 2019-20 season.

                 

    Ms. Avni is active in the music world beyond the realm of conducting. She was selected for the fellowship "The Future of the Orchestral Culture," a German-American-Chinese collaboration that meets regularly with prominent figures in the music world to discuss the issues, visions, and attitudes that shape the world of orchestras in Europe and overseas.