Lutz Kirchhof

About

A native of Frankfurt, Lutz Kirchhof has combined innovation, scholarship and skill to bring new life to an ancient instrument. Drawn to the lute at a very early age, Kirchhof has since built a festival around the instrument (the annual International Lute Festival, which takes place in Frankfurt) and created an institute devoted to the collection and study of its music (the Society of Lute Researchers, also based in Frankfurt) - all while pursuing an extraordinarily active concert career that constantly takes him around Europe and as far away as Australia.

Kirchhof graduated with honours from the Frankfurter Musikhochschule and studied musicology at the University of Frankfurt, where he also gave lectures on the lute. He originally studied Lothar Fuchs, a pupil of the seminal lutenist Walter Gerwig, and at nineteen he won first prize in the German musical competition "Jugend musiziert." As he developed his historically oriented technique, he drew inspiration from such diverse sources as the Elizabethan lutenist and composer John Dowland and the baroque Austrian musician Sylvius Leopold Weiss. Kirchhof founded his own consort in 1976, with which he made numerous appearances in concert, on radio, and on television. In 1995 he created Liuto Concertato, a new ensemble featuring voice, transverse flute, viola da gamba and lute. He also performs regularly with singers such as Max van Egmond and Derek Lee Ragin and with various other instrumental recitalists. Kirchhof won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis in 1993, for his album World Festival of the Lute.

Lutz Kirchhof's recordings for VIVARTE include the complete works for lute in original keys and tunings by Johann Sebastian Bach (SK 45858) and The Lute in Dance and Dream, a collection of French court music from the seventeenth century (SK 48068). In addition, Kirchhof has recorded three volumes of the lute works of Sylvius Leopold Weiss, also for VIVARTE (S2K 48391 and SK 57964). His most recent release, with Liuto Concertato, is entitled Love Songs and Dances: Consort Music from "Pratum Musicum" (SK 66263), which features the music of sixteenth-century Belgian composer Emanuel Adriaenssen. Released in Spring 2000 is Witches & Alchemists (SK 60767) which includes 17 dances and airs by a variety of European composers of the Renaissance era.

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