Time Remembered Matthias Kirschnereit

How time flies...

If the pianist Matthias Kirschnereit had the task of expressing his life and career to date in music, then this "playlist" would probably be the result. Each of the 36 pieces on this double album contains a personal story and was chosen by him because memories and incidents are connected with it. "For me, working on Time Remembered was and is an immensely exciting journey through almost 400 years of music history with a wide variety of genres and styles," Matthias Kirschnereit explains in the album's booklet. The long list of composers ranges from Bach, Bussoni, Bruckner down the alphabet to Handel, Janáček, Ligeti, Rachmaninov, Satie and Bill Withers. The double album thus also offers a very private insight into the life of Matthias Kirschnereit.

If you look at Matthias Kirschnereit's life and career to date from the outside, you discover many turning points, rough edges and a constant urge to express himself through music. The first turning point was certainly the fact that in 1971, at the age of nine, he moved with his parents from northern Germany to Namibia in Africa. His father was a pastor and got a job there. Of course, young Matthias already played the piano, but while his peers in Europe were already taking part in piano competitions, he played on an electronic piano that had to be connected to a car battery. The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" was played on the radio and the Liberation Group's song "Namibia" provided the fitting soundtrack for the independence movement. Matthias Kirschnereit listened to the Bach interpretations of Dinu Lipatti on his parents' record player and actually wanted to found the "Namibia Trio" together with two friends. But the next turning point followed shortly afterwards. At the age of 14, he went back to Germany alone, without parents, to enrol as a young student at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold. "It was a shock to see and hear what my peers could already play," he recalls. But the step did him good. His musical horizon expanded abruptly, he discovered Debussy and Clara Schumann, Handel and also the jazz pianist Bill Evans. Kirschnereit put all his eggs in one basket, wanted to become a pianist at all costs and left the Gymnasium without taking his Abitur. He still remembers the final conversation with his former headmaster with a shudder, but also with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He indignantly predicted that the most he would ever become was a piano teacher... And he was not entirely wrong. However, he probably did not have in mind that Matthias Kirschnereit would teach for more than 25 years as a professor at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre - and that he is still a sought-after career promoter for young talents there today.

Today, after almost 50 CD recordings, several thousand concerts performed worldwide, awards and prizes, Matthias Kirschnereit is still looking for new things, challenges and tasks. For more than 10 years, he has directed the summer festival "Gezeitenkonzerte" in East Frisia, bringing renowned colleagues such as Grigory Sokolov, Helge Schneider or Sharon Kam to the North Sea coast. In the Alte Oper Frankfurt, he invites pianists such as Daniil Trifonow or Evgeny Kissin for a talk before their performances under the title "Kirschnereits KlavierKosmos". On SWR2 he has already hosted several series of his own on the piano music of Mozart and Mendelssohn. In his adopted hometown of Hamburg, he was recently elected president of the Johannes Brahms Society and is concerned with the preservation and maintenance of the musical heritage. All of these activities generate an openness to music, even far beyond the confines of classical music. Concert tours to Asia, especially Japan, were and are always great highlights for the pianist. In Japan, he visited Toru Takemitsu's composing studio in the 90s and brought back the piece "Rain Tree Sketch II" from there. A friend who let him stay in Japan introduced him to the piece "Graceful Ghost Rag" by William Balcon. This musical memory is now also on this double album.

The list of tracks would probably have been even longer, because someone who travels so much in the world, has friends on all continents, and has played with so many musical partners as Matthias Kirschnereit, can tell countless stories. He has touched on some of them for each individual track in the booklet of this recording.

The album is entitled "Time Remembered" and also begins with the title of the same name by Bill Evans. The recording closes with "As Time goes by" by Herman Hupfeld from the film classic Casablanca, a film Matthias Kirschnereit has seen more than a dozen times. Time plays a considerable role on this double album. It is about the past, but also about the here and now. Matthias Kirschnereit writes about this in the booklet: ""Everything has its time" says the Old Testament - and so the music on this album also reflects the phenomenon of "time" par excellence. It is about time lived and time dreamed, time in love and time hoped for, time suffered and time lost, the time of change, freedom, jubilation and gratitude, and of course also the time for a wink!"