Special concert of the RSB Freundeskreis e.V. with Julia Fischer Quartett

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).

Enrico Palascino, born in 1982 in Turin, has been a member of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra since 2011. He regularly performs as a chamber musician and soloist, and also works as a substitute with the Hessian Radio, Bavarian Radio, West German Radio, and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. He began his violin studies at the age of 8 and later studied with Giacomo Agazzini at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Torino. He then continued his studies with Valeri Gradow in Mannheim and Stephan Picard in Berlin, supported by the Claudio Abbado Music Foundation DESONO.

In parallel, he completed a supplementary chamber music program with Susanne Rabenschlag in Mannheim and became a prizewinner at the Federal Competition with the Yuval Quartet. This led to performances at the Schwetzinger Festspiele, live recordings with Deutschlandradio, and tours in Spain and Italy.

In 2016, he followed his family to Namibia. There, he co-founded a music school for disadvantaged children in Windhoek (YONA) with singer Gretel Coetzee. He also contributed to the re-establishment of the Namibian National Symphony Orchestra (NNSO), organized concerts, composed and arranged Namibian folk songs, and worked publicly to foster a better understanding of classical music in Namibia.

Since returning to Berlin in August 2018, he has continued his involvement with YONA and the NNSO. In his free time, he is passionate about training for triathlons.

Martin Eßmann, born in 1971 in Dresden, began playing the violin at the age of 6, inspired by the musical traditions in his family.

After attending the specialized school for music, he went on to study violin at the Berlin University of the Arts “Hanns Eisler.”

During his studies, Martin Eßmann gained chamber music experience as a member of the Schill Quartet. With this ensemble, he participated in his first chamber music radio productions for DS-Kultur, RIAS, and WNYC (New York). In 1993, the Schill Quartet undertook a tour of the United States, and in 1995, it became a prizewinner at the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg. As a member of the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, Martin Eßmann was able to further pursue his chamber music ambitions.

Since 1996, he has been a member of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, playing in the second violin section.

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.

Lydia Rinecker has been the principal violist of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra since 2016. From 2014 to 2015, she held the same position with the Staatskapelle Weimar. Born in Meiningen in 1989, she attended the Music High School Schloss Belvedere in Weimar and then studied at the music universities in Weimar and Berlin, specializing in viola under Erich Krüger and Ditte Leser.

She is a prizewinner of various national and international competitions. Among her accolades, she received multiple 1st prizes at the national “Jugend musiziert” competition, the 1st prize at the 17th International Johannes Brahms Competition, a 3rd prize at the Walter Witte Viola Competition in 2011, and a special prize for “outstanding talent” at the 62nd International Music Competition of the ARD, awarded by the Henning Tögel Talent Promotion Foundation. In 2011, she was a scholarship recipient of the “Hans and Eugenia Jütting” Foundation in Stendal.

During her studies, she gained orchestral experience as a substitute in the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig and the Staatskapelle Weimar. As a soloist, Lydia Rinecker has performed with orchestras such as the Staatskapelle Schwerin, the Orchestra of the Theater Vorpommern, the Central German Chamber Philharmonic, the Czech orchestra “Virtuosi Brunensis,” and the Young Symphony Orchestra Berlin.

She plays a viola made around 1860 by the violin maker Karl Brandl from Pest.

Peter Albrecht began playing the cello at the age of nine. After studying with Walther Nothas (Munich), Alexander Baillie (Bremen), and Michael Sanderling (Frankfurt/Berlin), he started his career as a cellist with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin in 2002.

In parallel, he completed the Konzertexamen, which he finished in the summer of 2005. He also participated in numerous master and chamber music courses, including those with the Artemis Quartet, Henry W. Meyer, Frans Helmerson, Anner Bylsma, Ralph Kirshbaum, and Johannes Goritzki.

He performs together with Nadine Contini, Martin Eßmann, and Christiane Silber in the Contini Quartet, as well as in the cello quartet “Just Four Cellos” with Volkmar Weiche, Jörg Breuninger, and Christian Raudszus.