Jakob Fichert regularly performs solo and chamber music concerts with various musical partners and ensembles, playing a wide range of styles. The three projects below are featured in the seasons 25/26 and 26/27 alongside other programmes.
For more information please contact: Celia Frisby restage5@gmail.com or send a message via the contact form.
Gredler-Fichert Duo
Cello & Piano
The musical partnership of Matthias Gredler and Jakob Fichert goes back nearly 40 years to when, as teenagers and joined by Matthais’ sister Manuela, they played together as a piano trio, winning major prizes in youth competitions. Despite going their separate ways, initially to study, the partnership has never ceased. Matthias, currently professor of cello in both Vienna and Munich, was a member of the Vienna Piano Trio for 18 years, performing in prestigious festivals and venues the world over and recording a number of well-received CDs. Jakob is now lecturer in piano studies at the University of York and at Leeds Conservatoire. Having studied at the Royal College of Music, he has made his career predominantly in the UK as a performer, recording for Naxos, Toccata Classics and other labels, and as a teacher.
As a duo, Matthias and Jakob have recently performed in Vienna, Innsbruck, Munich and the South of France amongst others, playing mainstream works as well as hidden gems of past and contemporary repertoires.
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Sample Programmes
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The sample programmes demonstrate their commitment to more recent repertoire as well as to the great classical works for cello and piano:
Beethoven: Sonata no. 4 in C major, Op. 102 No. 1
Debussy: Sonata
Mendelssohn: Sonata No. 2 in D major, Op. 58
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Schumann: Fantasy Pieces, op. 73
Nikolay Rozlavets: Sonata No. 1
Beethoven: Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102 No. 2
Thomas Simaku: Ed e’subito sera
Brahms: Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38
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Lili Boulanger: D’un Soir Triste​
Michael Gredler: Raum
Schubert: Arpeggione
Lutoslawski: Grave
Webern: Complete works for Cello and Piano (c. 7 minutes)
Henriette Bosmans: Sonata in A minor
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In addition to concert performances, Matthias and Jakob are also available to give masterclasses on chamber music performances or on their own instruments.
Canons hidden in Roses:
Chopin – The Polonaises
Chopin’s six published Polonaises for solo piano and his Polonaise-Fantasy are amongst the composer’s most iconic masterpieces. Whether in the catchy tunes of the ‘Military Polonaise’ or the intricate textures of the later works, this music is filled with beauty and profundity. The Polonaises, perhaps even more than Chopin’s other works, show his affiliation with Polish culture and a firm sense of belonging to his homeland.
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Jakob Fichert’s affinity with these masterpieces goes back many years and has for him a deep personal connection:​
The idea of performing these works is rooted in my deep admiration for Chopin’s unsurpassed mastery and was spurred by listening to a tape recording of my late great-grandmother Lydia, who, coming from an orthodox Jewish family in Riga, studied piano in Berlin in the early 1900s. She survived Nazi Germany with the help and support of her brave husband Georg and continued to play the piano even in the most adverse circumstances. Her performance of Chopin’s C-sharp minor Polonaise Op. 26 no. 1. was made by my father, then a teenager, on his first tape recorder in the 1960s. Her playing is the moving testimony of her unwavering love of this music that radiates pride and nobility and has been an inspiration to me, three generations down the line.
Winterreise +
Norbert Meyn, tenor & Jakob Fichert, piano
Franz Schubert’s famous song cycle Winterreise - winter journey - is often associated with exile. The protagonist, in love and full of hope, is rejected in his homeland and staggers through a cold, hostile world, dealing with homesickness, disillusionment and alienation before finally reaching a sense of acceptance and speaking again to another human being, a fellow outcast and hurdy-gurdy player, the Leiermann.
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Winterreise + juxtaposes (or combines) excepts from Schubert’s cycle with songs and short piano works by composers who experienced exile themselves. Robert Kahn, Matyas Seiber and Karl Rankl were all refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria who found a new home in Britain. While Kahn lived in isolation and wrote almost 1000 piano pieces in Britain, Seiber composed modernist works and film music and Rankl wrote an English opera while working as music director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden after the war. Recently rediscovered, their songs connect the tradition of Brahms, Mahler and Schönberg with the best of English poetry. Song titles such as ‘In Exile’, ‘Weep you no more sad fountains’ and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ reveal both a sense of loss and a desire to belong to their new homeland with its beautiful language and rich cultural heritage.
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Tenor Norbert Meyn and pianist Jakob Fichert both grew up in Germany and made Britain their home. They first met at London’s Royal College of Music, where Norbert Meyn has been teaching German Lieder for the last 20 years, while Jakob Fichert teaches piano at York University and Leeds Conservatoire. Their past collaborations have included recordings of music by exile composer Peter Gellhorn and a tour of Germany with songs and chamber music by Robert Kahn.
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