Michala Petri

Michala Petri ranks among the select group of recorder virtuosos who have sustained thriving careers as soloists, recitalists, and chamber musicians. She regularly performs alongside her husband, Lars Hannibal, a guitarist and lutenist.

Born July 7, 1958, in Copenhagen, Denmark, she first encountered the recorder at age three and began lessons at five. The year 1969 proved decisive: she made her concerto debut in Tivoli while commencing studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover, West Germany, under Ferdinand Conrad. During the 1970s she enjoyed widespread success in the Petri Trio with her harpsichordist mother, Hanne, and cellist brother, David; from 1981 onward she appeared in a duo with her mother. Although her first recording was issued in 1975, international recognition arrived with the 1980 Philips album of Vivaldi’s Six Flute Concertos, Op. 10. Petri and Hannibal have undertaken numerous successful tours to the U.S., Japan, and across Europe, appearing together on several recordings. In 1995 the Queen of Denmark named her Knight of Dannebrog, and in 2000 she received Denmark’s foremost musical distinction, the Leonie Sonning Music Prize.

Her repertory is especially rich in the Baroque, encompassing works by J.S. Bach, Telemann, Sammartini, and others, yet also extends to later periods through more than one hundred compositions written expressly for her. She has likewise presented numerous transcriptions of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and a range of Scandinavian composers including Grieg, Alfvén, and Nielsen. Dozens of her recordings have appeared on RCA, Sony, Deutsche Grammophon, and her own imprint, OUR Recordings.

In 2009 Petri launched a project commissioning concertos from composers in different countries. The first results surfaced on the Grammy-nominated album Chinese Recorder Concertos, followed in 2012 by English Recorder Concertos with the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong. Danish and Faroese Recorder Concertos appeared in 2015, and German and French concertos the next year. Although separate from that initiative, her 2017 release Brazilian Landscapes presented music of national origins uncommon for the instrument.

She has continued to record Baroque repertory, as on the 2012 Decca album Blockflötenkonzerte: Händel, Marcello, Samartini, Telemann, Vivaldi, alongside contemporary works, many newly commissioned and issued on OUR Recordings. In 2019 she released American Recorder Concertos on that label and joined harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and viola da gamba player Hille Perl for a new recording of Bach’s sonatas for recorder, harpsichord, and viola da gamba. During the COVID-19 pandemic she issued albums of recorder music by Lars Hannibal and Sunleif Rasmussen, and reunited with Esfahani and Perl in 2023 for the album Corellimania.