Shaul Bustan is a versatile artist who, as a composer and conductor, moves naturally between cultures and genres. He was born in 1983 in a small kibbutz in the Negev desert of southern Israel. Growing up between his mother’s Persian heritage and his father’s Eastern European background, he was shaped early on by two distinct cultural worlds, which became the foundation of both his musical language and his artistic curiosity.

Today, Shaul is based in northern Germany, living close to water and forest. The surrounding landscape has quietly entered his music, shaping its atmosphere and sense of time.

“Seagulls circle above a soundscape woven from the waves of the fjord. A ship approaches. It hums, pushes itself into the field of sound (…) We hear how a place breathes.” kulturkanal.sh

After earning his Master’s degree in Composition from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance in 2009, Shaul began composing for many formats, from opera and chamber music to orchestral works and music for film, theatre and dance. His work often unfolds as a dialogue between carefully shaped form and open improvisation, creating music that feels both grounded and alive. His compositions have been performed by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, the German Chamber Orchestra Berlin, the EOS Chamber Orchestra Cologne and the Jewish Chamber Orchestra Hamburg, among others, and conducted by Omer Meir Wellber, Patrick Hahn and Susanne Blumenthal. He has also written numerous arrangements for Avi Avital and Giora Feidman.

A formative influence was his study with the composer and conductor Aharon Harlap, a student of Hans Swarowsky, with whom Shaul spent two years studying conducting alongside composition. Since then, conducting has been part of his work as a composer. In 2021 he founded Ensemble Flensburg, a cross-border ensemble for communicative new music, which he has led as artistic director ever since. Since its first concert in October 2022 he has conducted 14 world premieres with the ensemble, including works by Ceren Türkmenoğlu, Khadija Zeynalova and Kenneth Dahl Knudsen. From the 2026/27 winter semester he also conducts the Junges Ensemble Flensburg, the new chamber orchestra of the Europa-Universität Flensburg.

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