Biographie

Dr Axel Flierl was born in Nuremberg in 1976 and grew up in the Allgäu. He studied organ, organ improvisation and Catholic church music in Munich and Paris and musicology in Karlsruhe. His formative teachers were Prof. Edgar Krapp, Wolfgang Hörlin, Prof. Thierry Escaich and Vincent Warnier.

He completed his decades-long study of the work and person of Karl Höller (1907-1987) with a musicological dissertation on Höller's organ works under Prof. Dr. Thomas Seedorf, a previously unexplored chapter of German music history. Axel Flierl is considered a leading researcher on Karl Höller and an interpreter of his organ works in particular.

In 2006, he was appointed principal organist and conductor at the papal basilica minor of St. Peter in Dillingen an der Donau (Bavaria), the co-cathedral and second cathedral church of the diocese of Augsburg, and has turned this place into a centre of church music with charisma extending far beyond the borders of the region. For example, he initiated the international organ festival Dillingen Basilica Concerts around the large Sandtner organ. He has also performed the complete organ works of Karl Höller and Maurice Duruflé.

Concerts as an organ soloist and as a lecturer at master classes regularly take him to the leading organ centres in Australia, Hong-Kong, USA, Russia, Kazakhstan, Abkhazia, South America, South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iceland and almost all European countries.

He also held a visiting professorship at the Pontificio Istituto di Musica sacra in Rome from 2022 to 2025.

He has also made radio and television recordings, several CD recordings and is an author of books.