Sabine Meyer

Engaged as principal clarinet of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1982 at Herbert von Karajan's insistence, Meyer stayed a season and then left to play as a soloist — a decision that went on to define what a modern clarinet career could be rather than to end one. She was born at Crailsheim in 1959, taught first by her father and then by Otto Hermann in Stuttgart and Hans Deinzer in Hanover, and had already played in the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. What followed was four decades in front of the principal orchestras of Europe, America and Asia, a long exclusive relationship with EMI, and a run of premières by composers writing specifically for her. She founded the Trio di Clarone with her brother Wolfgang Meyer and Reiner Wehle, a group whose programmes ran from Mozart's basset-clarinet music to arrangements far outside it, and she held a professorship at the Musikhochschule Lübeck from 1993 until 2022. She gave her final concert in Bern in December 2025. Among the composers who have written for her are Jean Françaix, Edison Denisov, Toshio Hosokawa, Niccolò Castiglioni, Manfred Trojahn, Aribert Reimann, Peter Eötvös and Márton Illés, and alongside EMI she has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Sony and CAvi-music. The Trio di Clarone, in which Reiner Wehle is also her husband, gave more than five hundred concerts between 1983 and 2018, and in later years she worked with the Alliage saxophone quintet. She holds eight Echo Klassik awards, belongs to the Academy of Arts in Hamburg, and was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France in 2010.