Kirschnereit was born in 1962 and has graced stages across Germany, Europe, America, and East Asia for decades. He has performed internationally with renowned orchestras such as the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, New City Philharmonic Orchestra Tokyo, Het Residentie Orkest Den Haag, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, SWR Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Camerata Salzburg and the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Matthias Kirschnereit has collaborated with conductors such as Hartmut Haenchen, Marcus Bosch, Christopher Hogwood, Andrew Manze, Sándor Végh, Michael Sanderling, Frank Beermann, Alexander Liebreich, Ariane Matiakh, Yuri Temirkanov and Alondra de la Parra.
More than 40 recordings document his work, spanning from the early prize-winning CD of the German Music Competition (1989), through his complete recording of all Mozart piano concertos with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra (2009) and his album “Concertant” (2019) featuring all works for piano and orchestra by Robert Schumann (performed with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin under Jan Willem de Vriend), to his latest recording in 2023: a deeply personal solo album entitled “Time Remembered”.
Schubert and Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms are the predominant figures in Kirschnereit’s musical repertoire. Among his extensive collection of complete recordings are pieces by renowned composers that were previously unknown, such as the reconstructed E minor Piano Concerto by Mendelssohn, which won him the ECHO Klassik award in 2009. He has also recorded Handel’s entire organ concertos, rearranged them for piano himself. To celebrate the Beethoven anniversary in 2020, he produced the album “Beethoven unknown,” which features hidden treasures by the composer and quickly rose to the top 10 of the UK classical music charts. In 2022, he accomplished the full collection of Haydn’s lesser-known piano concertos with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn (play&lead).
His collaborators in chamber music are violinists like Christian Tetzlaff, Lena Neudauer, and Daniel Hope, horn player Felix Klieser, clarinettist Sharon Kam, and cellists Julian Steckel and Daniel Müller-Schott. He also collaborates with renowned quartets such as the Minguet, Aris, and Amaryllis.
Matthias Kirschnereit did not embark on a child prodigy journey – on the contrary, as he says himself – he “jumped on the very last train for a career as a pianist”. From ages nine to fourteen, an age when his peers were gaining valuable competition experience, he resided in Namibia with his parents, where training opportunities were scarce in pursuit of becoming a pianist. In 1976, he returned to Germany unaccompanied by his parents and enrolled as a young student under Renate Kretschmar-Fischer at the Detmold Academy of Music.
He has passed on his experience and convictions to the next generation of musicians as a professor at the Rostock Academy of Music and Theatre. Kirschnereit is dedicated to the “Rhapsody in School” initiatives and the TONALi cultural project. With the carefully selected programme of his “Gezeitenkonzerte” (Tidal Concerts), he has been drawing an increasingly large audience to this “festival among friends”, as Kirschnereit refers to it, since 2012.