Simon Fischer AGSM

Simon Fischer AGSM

Simon Fischer enjoys a distinguished and wide-ranging playing and teaching career. He has given many solo recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room and for the BBC, and has frequently played as soloist or concertmaster with major UK symphony and chamber orchestras such as the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra and many others, working with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Charles Groves, Richard Hickox, Andrew Litton, Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Yan-Pascal Tortelier, and Andre Previn.

He has also been active as a chamber musician, including leading the Chamber Group of Scotland with whom he gave many broadcasts and concerts of contemporary music, working closely with composers such as Sally Beamish and James MacMillan. He has also directed the European Union Chamber Orchestra on several tours including to Korea, China and Ireland

For the last 13 years he has also been active in the recording world in London, playing on many dozens of major film titles and albums including all the leading artists such as Madonna, Prince, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Paul MacCartney, Kylie Minogue and so on.

Fischer taught his first two students at the age of 17 and teaching has been a passion ever since. He has been a professor at the Guildhall School since 1982, and at the Yehudi Menuhin School since 1997. He also taught for 8 years at two other specialist music schools, Wells Cathedral and the Purcell, and for 15 years was a visiting professor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in Scotland.

Having studied the violin in London with Yfrah Neaman, whose teachers were Carl Flesch and Max Rostal – and in New York with Dorothy DeLay – Fischer’s approach unites the best elements of the French, Russian and American violin traditions and develops them further. In addition, he studied the Alexander technique for 8 years as a pupil of Walter Carrington, the leading Alexander teacher in the world and himself a pupil of F. M. Alexander. This has enabled Fischer to incorporate a third stream of influence into his teaching and writing.

His so-far 194 consecutive monthly articles in The Strad magazine have attracted world-wide interest and acclaim, as have his technique books Basics and Practice, now both translated into Korean and Italian. Through these works Fischer has succeeded in opening up and popularising the study of violin technique in a way that has brought to thousands of players around the world a level of help and training which had previously been the privilege of only the few. Basics and Practice are both on the required reading lists of many University pedagogy courses around the world.

He has also given several lecture-demonstrations in London to audiences of doctors on the causes of tension in string playing, and contributed a chapter to the book ‘The Musician’s Hand: A Clinical Guide’, by the hand surgeon Ian Winspur and Doctor Wynn Parry. He was commissioned by the Royal Free Hospital in London to make a film explaining the causes of tension in violin playing, a project unfortunately abandoned halfway through filming by the death of Dr Ian James who was running the project.

He frequently gives masterclasses, recitals and broadcasts abroad, including recently in Europe, the USA and Australia.

For many years Simon Fischer has been playing duo recitals with his father, the pianist Raymond Fischer. They have performed many times in the UK, in Germany and recently in Australia, where they played the three Brahms Sonatas in a live broadcast from Sydney. They have also recorded the three Brahms Sonatas.

Recent projects include a 5-week recital tour of Australia in August, a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and a series of violin self-teaching DVDs. His third book The Violin Lesson was published in 2008.