Oleg Maisenberg

Born in Odesa in 1945 and trained at Moscow's Central Music School and the Gnessin Institute, where Alexander Jocheles taught him, Oleg Maisenberg settled in Vienna and spent his working life there. A prize at the city's international Schubert competition and a first prize in 1967 in a competition for the music of the twentieth century marked out the two poles of his playing: Schubert, Schumann and Brahms on one side, the Russian romantics and the modern repertoire on the other. He was for many years Gidon Kremer's duo partner, accompanied Hermann Prey and Robert Holl, and played chamber music with Heinz Holliger. From 1985 to 1998 he taught in Stuttgart, then at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna until 2013; Till Fellner and Khatia Buniatishvili were among his students. The Wiener Konzerthaus made him an honorary member in 1995 and Austria gave him its Decoration for Science and Art in 2005. He died in 2026. His mother gave him his first lessons at five, and he appeared regularly with the Moscow Philharmonic between 1971 and 1980 before emigrating to Vienna in 1981. In the 1994-95 season he played twelve recitals at the Wiener Konzerthaus, each devoted to a single composer, and in 2004-05 the complete Rachmaninov works for piano and orchestra with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow under Vladimir Fedoseyev; a recording made with Sabine Meyer was nominated for a Grammy in 2008 and took an Echo Klassik award.