Hungarian pianist András Schiff, who was born in 1953 in Budapest, started piano lessons at the age of five. He studied with Pál Kadosa, György Kurtág, and Ferenc Rados at the Liszt Academy in Budapest and later with George Malcolm in London. He launched his international career when he won first prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1974; the following year he won the Leeds Piano Competition. Schiff has gained a special reputation for his interpretation of works by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Bartók, which he frequently performs in programmatic cycles. From 1989 to 1998 he led the Musiktage Mondsee, and in 1995, together with Heinz Holliger, he founded the Ittingen Pfingstkonzerte; since 1998 the concert series Omaggio a Palladio, which Schiff conceived, has been held at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. As a soloist Schiff has collaborated with the leading international orchestras and conductors, and in recent years he himself has been active as a conductor, primarily with the Cappella Andrea Barca, which he founded in 1999 and with which he has traversed all the Mozart piano concertos. In addition, he has led the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Schiff’s numerous awards include the Bach Prize of the Royal Academy of Music and the Premio Abbiati (both in 2007), and the Robert Schumann Prize of the City of Zwickau (2011). The Beethoven House in Bonn has named him an honorary member; in January 2012 the International Mozarteum Foundation awarded him the Golden Mozart Medal. Schiff is currently collaborating with music publisher Henle on an edition of the original scores of the Mozart piano concertos, to which he is contributing the cadenzas left out by Mozart.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut in a recital on 21 August 1990 in works by Janácek, Bartók, Schubert, and Haydn
March 2012