Sunday, February 19, 2023

Christoph Schickedanz




Teaching Languages : English, German


German violinist Christoph Schickedanz, born in Darmstadt in 1969, began his multifaceted concert career after receiving awards as a soloist and chamber music interpreter at various competitions in Europe and the USA. 

In addition to his busy concert activities, more than 70 works have by now been released on CD. The recording of the 6 solo sonatas and partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach published by Audite in 2018 received special recognition with the nomination for the International Classical Music Awards 2019. For the CD recently released by the US label Centaur featuring the complete Johannes Brahms duo violin-piano works Schickedanz was hailed as an outstanding champion by British Gramophone Magazine. The latest release is a double CD on the label cpo in coproduction with Deutschlandfunk Köln with the complete duo music for violin and piano by German romantic composer Friedrich Gernsheim.

Christoph Schickedanz received his training first at the MHS Freiburg with Jörg Hofmann and as a DAAD scholarship holder at the Indiana University Bloomington with Franco Gulli, where he taught as an Associate Instructor for Violin from 1995. After completing the concert exam, he began teaching in Germany as an assistant to his former teacher Uwe-Martin Haiberg at the UdK Berlin. Further positions followed as a lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and as a visiting professor at the UdK Berlin. 

In 2004 Christoph Schickedanz accepted a full time Professorship at the University of Music and Theatre in Hamburg where he was also serving as Head of Strings for several years and is presently acting as Dean.

Since 2018 he is also regularly teaching at the Music Academy in Brescia, Italy. Among his students are competition price winners, many of his alumnis are holding positions as well in more than 30 German orchestras as abroad (Austria, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Qatar, Spain etc.) or are already teaching at important educational institutions in their home countries.

Mr. Schickedanz is regularly holding masterclasses in Europe, he furthermore received invitations to teach in universities such as Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, the Shanghai Conservatory, the Tongji University, the California State University Long Beach or music institutions in Kiev/Ukraine, Havana/Cuba or Port of Spain/Trinidad. 

In recent years, composing has become more and more attractive to Christoph Schickedanz. Since 2018 world premieres of his works have taken place in Germany and Austria, future premieres and performances were or are planned to be peformed in the chamber music halls at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and the Berlin Philharmonic.