Special concert of the Freunde und Förderer des Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin e.V.

Julia Fischer has been at the top of the world’s violin elite for 20 years. She also expresses her artistic diversity as a pianist, chamber musician and professor. As  the first artist in the field of classical music, she founded her own music platform, the JF CLUB.

As the daughter of  of German-Slovakian parents born in Munich, she  received her first violin lessons at the age of three. Shortly afterwards her mother Viera Fischer gave Julia Fischer her first piano lessons.  At the age of nine  she was accepted as a junior student of the renowned violin professor Ana Chumachenco at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. In 2011, Julia Fischer took her position at the very same institute from her former teacher.

Recent highlights of her career include concerts with the New York Philharmonic (Philippe Jordan), the Orchestre National de France (Emmanuel Krivine), with the Bavarian State Orchestra (Kirill Petrenko), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Riccardo Muti), the Cleveland Orchestra (Franz Welser-Möst), the Vienna Philharmonic (Esa-Pekka Salonen) or the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich (Herbert Blomstedt).

Julia Fischer regularly conducts the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, which has long been associated with her, and in May 2022 she will go on tour with the London orchestra, making   stops in Germany, Talinn, Barcelona and Madrid. Julia Fischer is Artist in Residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the current season with numerous performances in London and across Europe. She also performs, among other, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Vasily Petrenko), the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (Vladimir Jurowski) and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Michael Tilson Thomas).

Julia Fischer is also an enthusiastic chamber musician. The Julia Fischer Quartet with her long-time chamber music partners Alexander Sitkovetsky, Nils Mönkemeyer and Benjamin Nyffenegger will be touring again in January 2022. A recording of Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet was made in autumn 2020 together with Oliver Schnyder, Andreas Janke, Nils Mönkemeyer and Benjamin Nyffenegger for the JF CLUB. In November 2021 she went on another recital tour with Yulianna Avdeeva.

In 2017, Julia Fischer founded her own music platform, the JF CLUB, where her new recordings can be heard exclusively and where she provides insights into her work trough articles, videos or even personal meetings. With this, she is taking a new and individual path in the classical music market. In August 2021, Eugène Ysaye’s sonatas were released as a limited vinyl-edition in an exclusive JF CLUB edition .

Julia Fischer has previously released numerous CD and DVD recordings, first for  the Pentatone label and then for Decca. Her recordings have been met with the highest praise from internationally pioneering media and received numerous awards, including the BBC Music Magazine Award, the Choc der Monde de la Musique, the Diapason d’Or de l’Année or the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

Teaching is especially close to Julia Fischer’s heart. She feels a great need to be able to pass on something of her own childhood experiences. Her students have been very successful and are already being invited by major orchestras. Occasionally Julia Fischer performs together with them.

In the summer of 2019, Julia Fischer founded the Kindersinfoniker, an orchestra for children aged 6 to 14, which she leads together with the pianist Henri Bonamy and the conductor Johannes X. Schachtner. Julia Fischer also regularly gives master classes at the music holidays at Lake Starnberg.

Many awards honour the artist, she received the Federal Cross of Merit, the Bavarian Order of Maximilian and prizes such as the internationally highly regarded Gramophone Award or the German Culture Prize. She was included in the Century Violinist CD Edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Julia Fischer plays on a violin by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini (1742) as well as on a new violin by Philipp Augustin (2018).

Artistic brilliance and innovative programming are the trademarks that have earned Nils Mönkemeyer a reputation as one of the
world’s most successful violists, dramatically raising the profile of his instrument.

Under his exclusive contract with Sony Classical, Mönkemeyer has released numerous CDs over the past years, all of which have
won critical acclaim and prestigious awards. His programmes run the gamut from rediscoveries and first recordings of original
18th-century viola literature, to contemporary repertoire and arrangements of his own.

Nils Mönkemeyer works together with conductors such as Andrej Boreyko, Sylvain Cambreling, Elias Grandy, Christopher
Hogwood, Cornelius Meister, Mark Minkowski, Kent Nagano, Michael Sanderling, Clemens Schuldt, Karl-Heinz Steffens, Markus
Stenz, Mario Venzago and Simone Young, performing as a soloist with ensembles including Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Helsinki
Philharmonic Orchestra, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berne Symphony Orchestra, Deutsche
Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Dresden Philharmonic, Hamburg Philharmonic, Frankfurter
Opern- und Museumsorchester, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Weimar Staatskapelle,
Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra and Berliner Barock Solisten.

In the season 2021/22 he can be heard performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Symfonieorkest Vlaanderen and Kristiina Poska on a tour through BeNeLux and Estland, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and in Vienna, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, at the Schubertiade, Niedersächsische Musiktage, Heidelberger Frühling and Mozartfest Würzburg. Further highlights of the season are concerts with Sabine Meyer and William Youn and with the Julia Fischer Quartett.

Furthermore, he is pursuing a heartfelt wish as a musician to build bridges with music by making it accessible to the disadvantaged.
To this end, Nils Mönkemeyer founded the chamber music festival “Klassik für Alle” in 2016, in collaboration with the charity
Caritas Bonn.

Mönkemeyer has been a professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich since 2011 – the same institution at
which he himself studied with Hariolf Schlichtig.

Nils Mönkemeyer plays a viola made by Philipp Augustin.