Biography
After finishing classical music studies at the Staatliche Musikhochschule Freiburg in 1995, Lyhrus founded a non-professional music theater company called Theaterhaus in a village next to Freiburg and worked there for four years. In 2002 he founded in Freiburg the Lusorium Klangraumtheater, a sound theater company. He wrote and performed Das Winterbett in collaboration with Ullo von Peinen (Freiburger Stadttheater) and the John Sheppard Ensemble in 2003.
In the same year Lyhrus moved to Berlin to study at the SAE Berlin. He obtained a diploma as audio engineer in 2004. Beside that he started working as a graphic designer for orchestras, choirs and soloists throughout the world.
In 2008 Lyhrus re-founded the Lusorium in Berlin. Between 2009 and 2011 he wrote, produced and performed The garden and Quarrtsiluni, two full-length programmes combining spacial radio plays and live music for choirs, soloists, bands, and speakers.
In 2017, after working for 15 years as graphic designer for customers, Lyhrus decided to bring this work to an end. In the same year he walked on the Pilgrim's route to Santiago de Compostela.
When he came back from Spain in October 2017, he founded NOYA Theater of Sound and NOYA Chorus in Berlin to focus upon a new vision of spatial concert projects with non-professional singers. In 2018 the NOYA Ensemble came into being, a group of eight professional vocalists. Both groups rehearse and perform many of their concerts at the Osterkirche Berlin. In September 2018 Lyhrus performed the concert programme Vigilia in Berlin in collaboration with The NOYA Ensemble for the first time, followed by several concerts in Berlin and Potsdam between 2018 and 2020. In November 2018 the first staged concert of NOYA Chorus took place, called The book of hours. It combined choral works, electronic soundscapes, piano music, and performance. This project was followed up by the second programme The banquet which was performed in November 2019.
To get things concerning the public more simple and clear, the NOYA Ensemble altered its name into The Lyhrus Ensemble in 2020. This marked a separation of Lyhrus' work with professional and non-professional musicians. Taking advantage of the limitations due to the pandemic he started to work on re-arrangements of his compositions to make them part of the new concert programme ›The Pilgrim Age‹. This programme has been performed by the Lyhrus Ensemble in concerts since October 2021.
Due to a number of problems caused by the pandemic Lyhrus decided to terminate his work as artistic leader of NOYA in the beginning of 2022 and started to focus on further Lyhrus projects such as the recording of ›The Melophilia Cycle‹, of ›The Pilgrim Age‹ in collaboration with the Lyhrus Ensemble, and a first electronic studio project called ›Clock Works‹, an EP, that was released in early 2023.
In 2020 Lyhrus had started a collaboration with polish soprano soloist Dorota Bronikowska, who appears also as soprano singer of the Lyhrus Ensemble. Their first song programme ›Vespertine Blooms‹ was interupted by the pandemic, but Lyhrus and Dorota decided to continue their collaboration on this programme and started performing Vespertine Blooms in April 2023 in Berlin and Potsdam.