BIOGRAPHY

Amadeus Wiesensee (*1993) gave his debut with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester at the age of 12. In June 2019 the Süddeutsche Zeitung praised his performance of Brahms’ B major piano trio with Arabella Steinbacher as “poetic and ecstatic at world-class level” and wrote on occasion of his opening recital of Nymphenburger Sommer: „This young man has an almost uncanny sense of the dark places, the veiled spaces, the contemplative and its shadings. He is far from content with brilliantly illuminating the foreground of the pieces; the musical process allows him to give access, so to speak, to the echo chambers and fields of association that lie behind them. At its most exalted moments it seems as if one can explore the music as a three-dimensional environment.“

In 2023/24 Wiesensee will make his debut for the Neumarkter Konzertfreunde, go on tour in Spain and Ireland and will return to festivals such as the Beethovenfest Bonn and the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In 2021, he was awarded the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and Art's “Kunstförderpreis” in the category of music and was the first artist-in-residence of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn. In addition, in September 2022 he and his Lied partner Katja Maderer were awarded a special prize at the Hugo Wolf Academy's International Competition for Lied Art.

Amadeus Wiesensee is part of the "Lied the future” scheme, promoted by the Associació Franz Schubert Barcelona and supported by the Fundación Banco Sabadell. This program will propose Amadeus in 2023 mentorship and lessons with Christoph Prégardien and will also facilitate concerts performances in Spain. 

At the age of eight, Amadeus Wiesensee became a pupil of Prof. Thomas Böckheler at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich, and in 2007 he became a junior student with Prof. Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 2013, after Kämmerling’s death, he continued his studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich with Prof. Antti Siirala. Having finished the Bachelor and Master degree programmes, Amadeus continued his studies as part of the Master degree programme for contemporary music. He was also a scholarship holder of Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Munich, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Jürgen Ponto Stiftung, Carl Bechstein Stiftung and the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben.

Numerous masterclasses with teachers such as Sir András Schiff, Maria Joao Pires, Richard Goode, Dimitri Bashkirov, Leon Fleisher, Matti Raekallio and Hélène Grimaud have rounded off his training. He gained special and lasting impetus from Alfred Brendel, Elisabeth Leonskaja and in the area of Lied from Christian Gerhaher and KS Christiane Iven.

His chamber music and stage partners have included Klaus Maria Brandauer, Arabella Steinbacher, Eckart Runge, Daniel Müller-Schott, Gustav Rivinius, Veronika Eberle, Julian Prégardien, Lydia Teuscher, Reto Bieri and Pablo Barragán.

Amadeus has been invited to many music festivals including the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Bologna Festival, Oxford Piano Festival, Richard-Strauss-Festival, Rheingau Musik Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, Würzburger Mozartfest, Oleg Kagan Musikfest, Schwetzinger Mozarttage, to Schloss Elmau, to St. Martin-in-the-Fields as well as to Konzerthaus Berlin on invitation of Christian Thielemann.

Amadeus Wiesensee has won prizes at German and international youth competitions, including Jugend musiziert, the Karl Lang Competition, the Schumann Competition in Zwickau and the Klavierpodium international competition in Munich. In 2018, he was chosen among more than hundred applicants to be one of six nominees for the International German Piano Award. He has repeatedly won special prizes and was supported by the Jürgen Ponto Stiftung and the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben. He has played live many times on radio for stations such as BR, WDR and SWR. In February 2019 he was awarded with the “cultural star of the year” in the category “classical music” by the Münchner Abendzeitung.

In January 2014, he made his debut with the Bayerisches Landesjugendorchester playing the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Franz Liszt in the Philharmonic Hall in the Gasteig Munich - a performance broadcast by BR-Klassik. He has performed as a soloist with many ensembles including the Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Deutsche Streicherphilharmonie, Philharmonisches Orchester der Stadt Heidelberg, Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, Bergische Symphoniker and Bad Reichenhaller Philharmoniker and he has worked with conductors such as Dimitri Jurowski, Sebastian Tewinkel, Peter Kuhn, Michael Sanderling and Clemens Schuldt.

The young pianist has been invited to premiere the works of many contemporary composers including Wilfried Hiller, Birke Bertelsmeier, Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz and John Foulds.

Amadeus Wiesensee’s second great passion alongside the piano is philosophy - a subject he simultaneously studied at the Munich School of Philosophy until July 2015, receiving the Bachelor of Arts degree with highest distinction. He is a regular speaker and pianist at Heidelberg University as part of the Heidelberg Lectures on Cultural Theory. In addition, he was invited as Guest Lecturer at Bard College Berlin in 2021 and gives a TED Talk at TEDxVaduz.

(Februar 2023)