Heike Matthiesen

Guitarist Heike Matthiesen trained under Pepe Romero and built an international career appearing both as a soloist and in chamber ensembles across multiple continents. She earned recognition for her advocacy of compositions by women, whether newly written or rediscovered from past centuries.

Born June 27, 1964, in Braunschweig, then part of Lower Saxony in West Germany, Matthiesen grew up in a household where her father worked as a choral conductor and her mother performed on the piano, both sharing a strong interest in opera. Although she received a wide-ranging musical upbringing that included piano instruction, she waited until age 18 to begin guitar lessons. Progress came quickly, leading her to enroll the following year at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt under Heinz Teuchert; to support her studies she joined the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester, an affiliation she maintained alongside a sustained connection to the Villa Musica concert series in Mainz. After completing her degree she pursued private instruction with Pepe Romero, an encounter she later identified as pivotal to her artistic development, and she stepped in for him during a 1996 Romero Brothers recital. Additional master classes brought her into contact with Leo Brouwer, Manuel Barrueco, Roland Dyens, and other leading figures. Her first recording, the 2001 album Sol y Luna, appeared at this stage of her career.

Matthiesen’s performances as both soloist and chamber musician took her to an unusually broad range of venues, among them Leipzig’s Gewandhaus and the Salzburg Festival, while her touring itinerary encompassed numerous European nations as well as East Asia, the United States, and several African countries including Equatorial Guinea. Regular appearances at international guitar festivals formed another consistent thread. She actively commissioned and premiered new pieces by contemporary women composers while also reviving earlier works by female creators. In this connection she directed the Archiv Frau und Musik and oversaw its guitar holdings. Matthiesen further distinguished herself through extensive use of digital platforms and social media to share her performances, with certain videos accumulating more than two million views. Additional releases followed, culminating in the 2023 Ars Produktion album Guitar Divas. In her final years she confronted malignant melanoma yet maintained an active concert schedule until her death from the illness on December 22, 2023.