Tomasz Konieczny, Michael Schade, Rachel Frenkel, Beethoven Academy Orchestra & Martin Fischer-Dieskau
Biography Tomasz Konieczny, Michael Schade, Rachel Frenkel, Beethoven Academy Orchestra & Martin Fischer-Dieskau
Martin Fischer-Dieskau
knows how hard it is to gauge the worth of a serious conductor. Not feeling the need for superficial dazzle, he is able in a flash to gain the confidence of his players. His command of the structure of the piece is combined with sure-fire technique.
As a musician of our day Martin Fischer-Dieskau eschews over-specialization. He has devoted his entire career to the study of the Viennese Classics and to the exploration of new music and contemporary production. In acknowledgement of the century-old tradition of conducting, he excels in the performance of the great Austro-Germanic symphonic repertoire, while international opera houses have invited him to conduct more than 40 works of every genre.
When Maestro Fischer-Dieskau conducts from memory, the audience and the orchestra feel secure. The great heritage of Western music, both in style and content, find continuity. The fusion of music and listener becomes a reality. After four music directorships on three continents and hundreds of guest engagements his audiences worldwide look forward with pleasure to an authentic musical experience, whether in opera or in concert.
A scion of the 19th century classical music tradition, Martin Fischer-Dieskau has developed a keen sense of innovative flair for unusual and varied programming. He brought Rameau, Glière, Blacher and the foremost contemporary Taiwanese composers to Taipei, the Bruckner symphonies to Mainland China, and a much-heralded production of Mozart’s "Magic Flute" to Chopin-haunted Mallorca. Over the years, he has conducted nearly 100 orchestras worldwide, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Moscow State Orchestra, Orchestre national de France, the NHK Tokyo, the Tokyo Philharmonic, and the New Japan Philharmonic. He has led all the major orchestras of Germany, Scandinavia, and many Italian and Spanish orchestras as well.
Maestro Fischer-Dieskau records for the Marco Polo and BIS labels, and has established his own television series introducing young musicians for the German ARD-TV channel. In addition to his international guest conducting activities, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau held a professorship at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen.
A firm believer in the value of learning his craft from the ground up, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau spent his early years in the German houses in Augsburg, Aachen, Hagen, and Stuttgart. At the Bern Symphony Orchestra, where he served as Principal Conductor from 1990 till 1994, he conducted a variety of new, Russian, and Italian works. As Principal Conductor of the Canadian Kitchener-Waterloo (KW) Symphony from 2000 to 2004 he augmented the orchestra’s standard repertoire and opened the concert hall to new audiences. With the KW Symphony he also inaugurated the first German-Canadian Festival in Toronto in 2002. From 2009-2011 he was director of the Taipei Symphony Orchestra conducting a wide range of classical and Taiwanese repertoire while organizing an International Puccini symposium.
Early on, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau led productions at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples and the Regio in Turin and became a frequent guest at international festivals such as Helsinki, Granada, and Berlin. In 2000 he helped to inaugurate the first season of the newly-created Boca Raton Sinfonia in Florida, and was immediately invited for a return visit which attracted more than 15,000 spectators in an open-air concert event. The following seasons brought him back to Israel, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the United States. In 2013 he followed these commitments with a tour of the German Radio Orchestra
featuring Wagner and Verdi. A highlight of 2015-2016 was assignments with new orchestras in China and Romania conducting Beethoven’s Ninth. In the summer of 2017, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau led the Orquesta Sinfónica Tenerife in works by Stravinsky, Gounod, and Jean Françaix.
Maestro Fischer-Dieskau’s early career was launched by an invitation from Seiji Ozawa to join the much sought-after Leonard Bernstein Fellowship program at Tanglewood in 1978, a program he had the privilege of attending again a decade later, in 1988, and then once more, in 1997. His earliest success was a production in 1974 of Haydn’s rarity “Il Mondo della Luna” in his native Berlin. At the age of 23, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau was chosen by Antal Doráti to become Assistant Conductor at the Detroit Symphony. His studies included conducting, violin, and piano at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, the Universität der Künste in Berlin and the Accademia Chigiana di Siena. He participated in masterclasses with Franco Ferrara, Maestro Ozawa, and Leonard Bernstein. To this he added the study of Italian literature and musicology, earning a PhD in 2015 from the Freie Universität Berlin and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne.
