• Joy of Music – Over 250 years of quality, innovation, and tradition

Cello Duello

About Cello Duello

Cello Duello celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2016. Jens Peter Maintz and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt – both now professors of cello – studied together with David Geringas in Lübeck. The duo has concertized around the world and been invited to the most important cello festivals: among them the Kronberg Cello Festival, the Rutesheim Cello Academy, the Amsterdam Cello Biennale and,
in 2006, the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival in Los Angeles. The duo’s repertory includes highly entertaining pieces as well as artistically challenging programs ranging from the Baroque to new works written especially for Cello Duello. They also perform their own arrangements of pieces originally for other instruments. In 2010, a CD was released with works from Paganini to Haydn, as
well as with Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt’s arrangement of Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Enjott Schneider’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is, after Søren Nils Eichberg’s House of Mirrors, the second double concerto written for Cello Duello.

Jens Peter Maintz won the First Prize in the 1994 ARD Competition and shortly afterwards was appointed solo cellist with the DSO Berlin, a position he held until 2004. Since then, he has been the cello professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In 2006, he became solo cellist with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Claudio Abbado. Maintz has worked with numerous distinguished conductors and is a popular chamber music partner. His CD with works by Bach, Dutilleux, and Kodály received an ECHO Klassik prize; his CD with Haydn’s cello concertos was also well received. Maintz plays a 1697 instrument by Giovanni Grancino.

Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt, while still a student, won several important competitions: the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris, the German Music Competition in Bonn, the International Australasian Cello Competition in New Zealand, as well as the contemporary music prize of the Rostropovitch Competition. He wasa prizewinner at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Leonard Rose
Competition in the USA. He now concertizes around the world with important orchestras and  conductors, and is a chamber music partner with many international artists. His CD recordings have received the German Recording Critics Prize and the Diapason d’Or. He plays a cello built by Matteo Gofriller that was previously owned by Hugo Becker.

 www.wolfgangemanuelschmidt.com

Products