Michael Cohen-Weissert is a composer, pianist, and conductor. His work moves between performance and composition across different genres, including jazz, folk, and contemporary classical music. He is also active as a jazz pianist and is continually seeking ways to develop into a more universal musician.
Born in Jerusalem in 1993, he moved to Berlin in 2008, where he has since established himself and is currently based. He has a diverse career, performing as a soloist and conductor with orchestras such as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano, and the Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock, as well as appearing as a sought-after chamber musician alongside artists such as Claudio Bohórquez, Jens-Peter Maintz, Máté Szücs, Mark Bouchkov, and Nur Ben-Shalom, among others.
As a composer and arranger, he collaborates closely with numerous musicians and projects, including the project Lebensmelodien, for which he has composed and arranged over forty pieces inspired by melodies written between 1933 and 1945. His music is regularly performed by musicians and ensembles such as Philharmonix, Tomoki Park, Markus Merkel, and the Nimrod Ensemble. In 2018, his first opera, AMALIA!, was premiered in Bolzano.
Believing that a modern artist must not only perform but also help shape artistic contexts, he founded the Charles Rosen Ensemble, dedicated to the performance and promotion of contemporary music, and serves as co-artistic director of the festival Éole en Musiques in France. He recently founded the Junction Ensemble, a multi-genre group that brings together musicians from different backgrounds with the aim of exploring connections between styles and traditions.
His piano teachers were Elena Lapitskaja, Jacques Rouvier, and Stefan Arnold. He also attended composition classes with Elena Mendoza and Marc Sabat, as well as chamber music classes with teachers such as the Artemis Quartet and Eberhard Felz. In addition to his studies, he attended masterclasses and worked with musicians including Claude Frank, Bruno Rigutto, Aldo Ciccolini, Paul Badura-Skoda, and Peter Serkin.