Roland Härdtner

Roland Härdtner was born in 1964 in Pforzheim.
Although he didn’t begin his professional musicalcareer until the age of 20, he was already able to stablish himself in the concert business at the beginning of his studies. He is in particular a specialist at playing the mallets (in the literal sense the sticks used to play Marimba and Vibes). Already at the beginning of his studies at the University of Music in Düsseldorf he discovered his love for the marimba and the vibraphone.

Besides his activity as an orchestral musician in different theatres and symphony orchestras, the work as a soloist with musicians and ensembles of all different kinds inspired the principal timpanist and percussionist of the ‚Badische Philharmonie Pforzheim’.

Since then Roland Härdtner has developed an exceptionally diverse and internationally unique repertoire as a soloist for the Mallets, with which he has being playing concerts for the last 25 years throughout Germany and Europe.

He is to be heard on now 14 different solo CDs with musical styles ranging from world music through pop and jazz, and from music of the baroque through romanticism up to the modern classic. He has worked with the internationally known djembe-player Amadou Kienou, the ‚Baden-Badener Philharmonie‘, the ‚Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester‘ and with the ‚Badische Philharmonie Pforzheim‘.

Since 2008 he has a close friendship with the renowned composer Ney Rosauro, which led frequently to outstanding concert- and CD- projects, were both artists were able to realize their common musical understanding successfully. This is illustrated especially by the CD "Brazilian Fantasy" released in 2018, which - planned by Härdtner and as executive producer conceptualized this way - features as a portrait of the composer solely works by Rosauro as a conjoint first recording.

The impulse for new projects, CDs and concerts come from the wide ranging possibilities of the Mallets, combined with the constant desire to interpret compositions with his own personal style.