Podcast of the Kölner Philharmonie

Current episodes

Our hosts

• Katherina Knees

  Katie Knees caught fire for everything to do with music and theatre at the age of six in the children's choir of the Städtische Bühnen Münster. After a youth in the Bundesjugendorchester, she studied double bass at the Musikhochschule Köln, where she discovered that there was something she liked doing even more: talking to musicians and writing down her thoughts about music. She studied musicology and art history at the Universität Düsseldorf, made films for WDR and Arte and did numerous music reports for the radio. She also regularly organises concert introductions and designs and presents the Bergische Symphoniker's school concerts. In her work as a certified funeral speaker, she deals intensively with the small and big questions of life. Katie Knees has three children and lives in Ehrenfeld.

• Christoph Vratz

  Saturday afternoons often demanded a decision when I was young: Bundesliga or "Interpretenporträt", Borussia or Horowitz? How good that the music programmes could be recorded on MC cassette. Born in Mönchengladbach in 1972, he came full circle after studying in Wuppertal and Paris, when his path did not lead him into teaching, but into the unknown territory of freelance music journalism. Initially writing for the "Rheinische Post" and print media such as "Opernwelt" and "Fono Forum", his first attempts on the radio followed in 2000. Since then, he has been travelling as an author, presenter and juror for magazines, radio and concert halls, based on the "Côte à Sürth" in the south of Cologne, and his weakness for composers with a B or Sch (and M) remains to this day.