Biography

Franziska Pietsch comes from a family of musicians and grew up in East Berlin. Under the aegis of Professor Werner Scholz at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin, she won ?rst prizes, made her debut at the Komische Oper in Berlin at the age of eleven, and played with the major orchestras of the GDR. When her father remained in the West after a tour in 1984, it took two years until the family was able to follow him. After leaving East Germany, she studied with Professor Ulf Hoelscher. She completed her musical education at the Juilliard School in New York with Dorothy DeLay.

She performed with renowned orchestras as Concertmaster, including the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and the Frankfurt Opera. At the same time, she also performed as a soloist throughout Europe, America and Asia. Since 2010, she has devoted herself entirely to chamber music. With the Trio Testore, she recorded the complete piano trios of Johannes Brahms. In 2014, together with the violist Sophia Reuter and the cellist Johannes Krebs, she founded the Trio Lirico and recorded CDs of works by Max Reger. The recordings they made with pianist Detlev Eisinger generated remarkable international critical acclaim.

In 2017, Franziska Pietsch made a recording of the Proko?ev concertos with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the baton of Cristian Macelaru, which was nominated for the “International Classical Music Awards” and awarded the “Vierteljahrespreis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik”. With the solo CD she released in 2018 (Bartók, Ysaÿe and Proko?ev), she demonstrated the broad scope of her artistic range. In 2019, she released works by Schnittke, Penderecki and Weinberg with the Trio Lirico. Also in 2019, she released her ?rst recording together with her duo partner, Josu de Solaun (Strauss and Shostakovich). In summer 2020, she released the CD “Fantasque” with compositions by Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc, which was awarded the prestigious ICMA prize in January 2021.