Matthias Kirschnereit

Kirschnereit, born in 1962, has been performing on the stages of Germany, Europe, America and East Asia for 40 years. Almost 40 recordings document his work, from the early prize-winning CD of the German Music Competition in 1989, to the complete recording of all of Mozart’s piano concertos together with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and the 2019 album “Concertant” with all of Robert Schumann’s works for piano and orchestra (Konzerthausorchester Berlin under Jan Willem de Vriend) to his latest 2021 recording of concert pieces and concertos by Hummel, Weber, Mendelssohn (Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt under Michael Sanderling).
Schubert and Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms are the fixed stars in Kirschnereit’s piano heaven. He also devotes himself to works by Mozart, Chopin and Rachmaninoff. But his remarkably large number of complete recordings also features unknown works by well-known composers, such as Mendelssohn’s reconstructed Piano Concerto in E minor, for which he received an ECHO Klassik in 2009. He recorded all of Handel’s organ concertos in his own arrangements for piano. The CD “Beethoven unknown” created for the Beethoven anniversary in 2020 contains unknown gems by the composer and immediately entered the top ten of the German classical music charts. In 2021/2022 a complete recording of the rarely performed Haydn Piano Concertos will be made together with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn.
For a long time, he has been passing on his experiences and convictions as a professor at the University of Music and Theatre in Rostock to the next generation of musicians. With the hand-picked program of his “Gezeitenkonzerte” he has been attracting a steadily growing audience to this “festival among friends”, as Kirschnereit calls it, since 2012.