Rudolf Buchbinder

RUDOLF BUCHBINDER (1946) is one of the legendary performers of our time. The authority of a career spanning more than 66 years is uniquely combined with esprit and spontaneity in his piano playing. Tradition and innovation, faithfulness and freedom, authenticity and open-mindedness merge in his reading of the great piano literature. At the age of five Buchbinder became the youngest student at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. He gave his first public concert at the age of 10 and played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. He studied piano with Prof. Marianne Lauda, in 1958 he was admitted to the master class of Prof. Bruno Seidlhofer. In 1962 he was awarded the Lipatti Medal, four years later - the Special Prize at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He began performing actively as a soloist and as a chamber musician in partnership with violinists Nathan Milstein and Josef Suk, and with cellist János Starker. Since then he has played with all major orchestras and conductors, regularly both as soloist and conductor. Buchbinder has built up an impressively extensive repertoire from the Viennese classics to the 20^th century. His interpretations of works by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven are regarded as high and standards setting. To date, he has performed Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas in cycles around the world more than 60 times, continuing to develop the history of interpretation of these works over the decades. With the edition BUCHBINDER:BEETHOVEN, Deutsche Grammophon presents a complete recording of the 32 piano sonatas and the five piano concertos, thus creating a sounding monument to two outstanding Buchbinder-Beethoven cycles of recent times. Buchbinder was the first pianist to play all of Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas within one festival summer at the 2014 Salzburg Festival. The Salzburg cycle was recorded live for DVD (Unitel) and is now also available on nine CDs. The sensational cycle of Ludwig van Beethoven's five piano concertos came about during the 2019/20 concert season at the Vienna Musikverein. In celebration of its 150^th anniversary, the Vienna Musikverein, for the first time in its history, gave a single pianist, Rudolf Buchbinder, the honor of performing all five piano concertos by Ludwig van Beethoven in a specially created series. Buchbinder's partners in this unprecedented constellation were the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Gewandhauskapellmeister Andris Nelsons, the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Muti and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden under their principal conductors Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann. All concerts were recorded live. The Musikverein cycle, released on three CDs in September 2021 on Deutsche Grammophon, is a historic document of these artistic summits and a tribute to Buchbinder as one of the most profound Beethoven interpreters of our time. On his new album Soirée de Vienne, Rudolf Buchbinder recreates a Viennese evening party and brings together composers who are intimately connected with Vienna - like himself. As a contribution to the celebrations marking the 250^th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth, Rudolf Buchbinder initiated a cycle of new Diabelli Variations. Following the genesis of Beethoven's epochal Diabelli Variations op. 120, Buchbinder succeeded in enlisting eleven leading contemporary composers of different generations and origins - Lera Auerbach, Brett Dean, Toshio Hosokawa, Christian Jost, Brad Lubman, Philippe Manoury, Max Richter, Rodion Schtschedrin, Johannes Maria Staud, Tan Dun and Jörg Widmann - to write their personal variations on the same waltz theme as Beethoven once did. The New Diabelli Variations were commissioned by eleven concert promoters worldwide with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and received their world premiere by Rudolf Buchbinder at the Vienna Musikverein before becoming a part of his touring programs in Europe, Asia and the United States. Under the title The Diabelli Project, Deutsche Grammophon released the world premiere recording of the New Diabelli Variations in March 2020 alongside a new reading of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, which Buchbinder last recorded before in 1976. The double album marked the beginning of his exclusive partnership with Deutsche Grammophon. Rudolf Buchbinder is an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. For his services he has been awarded high Austrian distinctions and medals. He is the first soloist to be awarded the Golden Badge of Honor by the Staatskapelle Dresden. Buchbinder attaches great importance to source research. His private collection of sheet music includes 39 different editions of Beethoven's complete piano sonatas as well as an extensive archive of first printings, original editions and copies of the autograph piano parts of both piano concertos by Johannes Brahms. Buchbinder's discography numbers more than 100 phonograph records and CDs, many of which have been recognized with international awards. He teaches at the Musik-Akademie Basel. He is the founder and artistic director of the Grafenegg Festival at Grafenegg Castle (Lower Austria), founded in 2007. He is the author of three books: the autobiographical Da Capo (2008), My Beethoven - Life with the Master(2014) and The Last Waltz: 33 Stories of Beethoven, Diabelli and Piano Playing"(2020).