Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff and Kiveli Dörken play Beethoven, Dvořák and Smetana at Wigmore Hall on 15 September 2026.
Christian Tetzlaff was born in Hamburg in 1966 to amateur musicians who had met in a church choir, took up the violin and the piano at six and gave his first concert at fourteen. The breakthrough came at twenty-two, in 1988, playing Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic — a work most soloists come to late, if ever. Forty years of a soloist’s career later he still spends much of it playing chamber music, which is the genuinely unusual decision in a diary of that size.
Tanja Tetzlaff, the cellist beside him, is his sister, and they have played together for most of those years. Their Schumann piano trios with Leif Ove Andsnes took the chamber recording of the year in 2012. Kiveli Dörken, the young German-Greek pianist who runs the Molyvos festival on Lesbos, completes the trio here. He also leads the Tetzlaff Quartett with his sister, and he has been named instrumentalist of the year twice, two decades apart, most recently in 2026.
The programme is Beethoven, Dvořák and Smetana at Wigmore Hall on Tuesday 15 September 2026 at half past seven — violin, cello and piano, the formation all three works were written for, in a room small enough that a trio does not have to push. It closes the first week of the hall’s new season.