Nabil Sehata

Nabil Shehata was born 1980 in Kuweit as a son of German-Egyptoan parents. At the age of four years his family returned to Germany.

As a nine-year-old he loved the electric bass in the closing credits of a sad cartoon. Because he thought the sound came from a double bass, he began learning to play the instrument. After finishing school in 1999 he began studying the bass with Michinori Bunya in Würzburg and then, in 2002, transferred to Esko Laine at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik. During this period he had a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German People’s Study Foundation) and the "Young Musicians’ Podium" foundation. In 2003 he was engaged as solo double bass at the Berlin Staatsoper and the next year he moved to take up the same position with the Berliner Philharmoniker. In autumn 2006 Nabil Shehata was awarded the Praetorius Prize of the German state of Lower Saxony. Numerous solo concerts, with such partners as Daniel Barenboim and Thomas Quasthoff and TV recordings with great orchestras have taken him far beyond the borders of Germany. He gives master classes in Japan, Israel and Europe and starting in the winter semester of 2007 will be a professor at Munich’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater. His hobbies are mostly musical in nature, except for one: football.