Duo Fehse-Wilfert
The trumpeter Toni Fehse and the organist Jonas Wilfert met for the first time at a concert in Wurzen in January 2009.

Jonas Wilfert (1991) grew up in Hohburg near Wurzen. He recognized his passion for church music during his early childhood. Starting at the age of six, Jonas received piano lessons and extensive musical training from Horst Anders; at the age of twelve, his organ lessons began. He was strongly influenced by his teachers Elmar Lehnen and Matthias Eisenberg. In addition to his work as an organist from an early age on, Jonas launched his first concert series Wurzener Abendklänge, in which Wilfert and Fehse played together for the first time. His studies of church music and organ improvisation with Wolfgang Seifen led Jonas Wilfert to Berlin, where he has been the organist at St Afra since 2016, playing on the historical organ from the English organ workshop William Hill & Son.

Toni Fehse (1989) comes from Leipzig. He received his first trumpet lesson at the age of ten at the Leipzig “Johann Sebastian Bach” Music School from Matthias Wiedemann, later from Wilfried Thoß. Since 2011, he has studied trumpet, first at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar and then beginning in 2013 he transferred to the Dresden Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber to work with Tobias Willner.

After their first encounter in Wurzen, the duo performed together in and around Leipzig. This is where the desire to discover new repertoire began for both young musicians, through which several of their own arrangements, primarily of music from the Romantic period, came into being. The geographical separation, beginning in 2011 due to different places of study, did not prevent the two friends from continuing to give concerts. The Duo Fehse-Wilfert can now regularly be heard in concerts all over Germany.

Their first joint concert tour led the duo to Scotland in 2015, where they gave concerts as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in both the country’s main churches: Glasgow Cathedral and St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. Further concert tours followed in 2016 to Israel and in 2017 to Latvia. One particular highlight in Germany was the final concert of the 15th Görlitzer Orgelnacht on the Sonnenorgel (sun-organ) of the St Peter and Paul’s Church in 2016.

The duo also enjoys making music with other musicians. There have already been musical combinations with soprano, cello and a brass decimet. A small but delicious specialty is the duo’s collaboration with the young winemaker Jens Bettenheimer from Ingelheim, whose wine cuvée, Vino Maestoso, was created exclusively for Fehse and Wilfert and has been enjoyed by concertgoers since 2014.