A scion of the 19th century classical music tradition, Martin Fischer-Dieskau has developed a keen sense of innovative flair for unusual and varied programming. He brought Rameau, Glière, Blacher, and the foremost contemporary Taiwanese composers to Taipei, the Bruckner symphonies to Mainland China, and a much-heralded production of Mozart’s Magic Flute to Chopin-haunted Mallorca. Over the years, he has conducted nearly 100 orchestras worldwide, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Moscow State Orchestra, Orchestre national de France, the NHK Tokyo, the Tokyo Philharmonic, and the New Japan Philharmonic.  He has led all the major orchestras of Germany, Scandinavia, and many Italian and Spanish orchestras as well.

Maestro Fischer-Dieskau records for the Marco Polo and BIS labels, and has established his own television series introducing young musicians for the German ARD-TV channel.  In addition to his international guest conducting activities, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau holds a professorship at the Hochschule der Künste in Bremen.

A firm believer in the value of learning a craft from the ground up, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau spent his early years in the German houses in Augsburg, Aachen, Hagen, and Stuttgart. At the Bern Symphony Orchestra, where he served as Principal Conductor from 1990 till 1994, he conducted a wide range of new, Russian, and Italian works. As Principal Conductor of the Canadian Kitchener-Waterloo (KW) Symphony from 2000 to 2004 he augmented the orchestra’s standard repertoire and opened the concert hall to new audiences. With the KW Symphony he also inaugurated the first German-Canadian Festival in Toronto in 2002. From 2009-2011 he was director of the Taipei Symphony Orchestra conducting a wide range of classical and Taiwanese repertoire accompanied by an International Puccini symposium.

Early on, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau led productions at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples and the Regio in Torino and became a frequent guest at international festivals such as Helsinki, Granada, and Berlin. In 2000 he helped to inaugurate the first season of the newly-created Boca Raton Sinfonia in Florida, and was immediately invited for a return visit which attracted more than 15,000 spectators in an open-air concert event. The following seasons brought him back to Israel, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the United States. In 2013 he followed these commitments with a tour of the German Radio Orchestra featuring Wagner and Verdi. A highlight of 2015-2016 was assignments with new orchestras in China and Romania conducting Beethoven’s Ninth. In the summer of 2017, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau led the Orquesta Sinfónica Tenerife in works by Stravinsky, Gounod, and Jean Françaix. 

Maestro Fischer-Dieskau’s early career was launched by an invitation from Seiji Ozawa to join the much sought-after Leonard Bernstein Fellowship program at Tanglewood in 1978. His earliest success was a production in 1974 of Haydn’s rarity “Il Mondo della Luna” in his native Berlin. At the age of 23, Maestro Fischer-Dieskau was chosen by Antal Doráti to become Assistant Conductor at the Detroit Symphony. His studies included conducting, violin, and piano at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and the Accademia Chigiana di Siena.  He participated in masterclasses with Franco Ferrara, Maestro Ozawa, and Leonard Bernstein. To this he added the study of Italian literature and musicology, earning a PhD in 2015 from the Freie Universität Berlin. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau lives in Berlin with his wife, violinist Katarina.