Christian Dierstein has been a member of Ensemble Recherche since 1988. He studied in Freiburg under Bernhard Wulff and in Paris under Gaston Sylvestre and has won many awards at international competitions, as well as being awarded scholarships by Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Academy Castle Solitude in Stuttgart. As a soloist, he has toured Europe as part of “Rising Stars”. He is a founder member of Trio Accanot alongside Marcus Weiss and Yukiko Sugawara. Apart from contemporary music, his main interests are non-European music and improvisation and he regularly collaborates with renowned contemporary composers such as Hans Abrahamsen, Beat Furrer, Hugues Dufourt, Helmut Lachenmann, Rebecca Saunders and Salvatore Sciarrino. He has been professor of percussion and new chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik Basel, Switzerland since 2001 and gives masterclasses around the world.v