Bernd Glemser

Bernd Glemser collected seventeen competition prizes — Cortot, ARD, Busoni, Sydney among them — before he had finished studying with Vitaly Margulis, and in 1989, while still studying in Freiburg, was appointed in Saarbrücken as the youngest professor of piano in Germany; since 1996 he has held the chair at the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg. Born in Dürbheim in 1962, he built his repertoire out of the Romantic and early modern virtuoso literature — Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Tchaikovsky — and has made recordings for Naxos. His discography includes Mendelssohn's Songs without Words and the Variations sérieuses. He has played with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester, the London Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Zurich and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, under Blomstedt, Chailly, Kitayenko, Orozco-Estrada, Sawallisch and Welser-Möst. Since 2006 he has been a permanent guest of the Klosterkonzerte Maulbronn, where he directs a chamber series and gives annual master classes. He received the Andor Foldes Prize in 1992, the European Pianist Prize in Zurich in 1993 and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2003. The halls have included the Berliner Philharmonie, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the Gewandhaus, the Herkulessaal in Munich, the Royal Festival Hall and the Musikverein, and he has also played under Muhai Tang.