Peter Rösel

Well over two hundred appearances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Kurt Masur sit at the centre of Peter Rösel's working life. Born in Dresden in 1945, he studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Dmitri Bashkirov and Lev Oborin, and returned to a career built on the German orchestras — the Gewandhaus above all, but also the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the London Philharmonic — with festival engagements in Salzburg, Edinburgh, London and Perth. On record he has completed the Beethoven sonatas and the piano music of Brahms, in readings that hold to the structure and decline the grand gesture. Prizes at the Robert Schumann competition in 1963, the Tchaikovsky in 1966 and the Montreal in 1968 came while he was still studying in Moscow, and he has since sat on the juries of the Queen Elisabeth, William Kapell, Geneva, Sendai and Montreal competitions. He recorded the Weber concertos with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Herbert Blomstedt and the Schumann with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Masur, and King Records issued the Beethoven cycle as he gave it in Tokyo. Dresden awarded him its art prize in 2009, and he belongs to the Saxon Academy of Arts.