© Janine Kuehn
Ketan Bhatti works across the boundaries of genre and culture. His work ranges from contemporary chamber music and experimental music and dance theatre to stage and film music, as well as electronic and hip-hop-based productions.
As a composer for the stage, Ketan Bhatti regularly collaborates with his brother Vivan Bhatti on productions by directors including Nuran David Calis and Adrian Figueroa at venues such as the Deutsches Theater Berlin, Schauspiel Köln, Staatstheater Hannover and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, as well as for the international breakdance shows of Flying Steps. The music theatre works of Ketan Bhatti and Vivan Bhatti often engage with questions of social heterogeneity in the post-migrant reality, among other themes, and have been premiered and performed at venues including the Staatsoper Stuttgart, Staatsoper Hannover, the Neuköllner Oper and the Tischlerei der Deutschen Oper Berlin. Their orchestral debut album, “Flying Pictures at an Exhibition”, was released by Sony Classical.
Together with Cymin Samawatie, Ketan Bhatti founded the Trickster Orchestra in 2013, creating contemporary, transtraditional sonic worlds. The orchestra was awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis and the tonali award in 2022, and the WDR Liminal Music Prize in 2025. Its work explores questions surrounding the decolonisation of contemporary music. Ketan Bhatti was, among others, a scholarship holder of the Deutscher Musikrat and received the 2023 GEMA Authors’ Prize for Intercultural Composition and the 2025 Friedlieb-Ferdinand-Runge-Prize. In the same year, he was a fellow of the Beethovenfest Bonn.
Bhatti’s music will be heard for the first time at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in DER SANDMANN during the 2026/2027 season.
