Rudolf Buchbinder

The Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, who was born in 1946, can look back on a career spanning more than 60 years, during which he has partnered with the most renowned orchestras and conductors in the world. His creative focus has been on the works of Ludwig van Beethoven: he has now performed the cycle of 32 sonatas more than 60 times, including in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Dresden, Milan, Beijing, St. Petersburg, and Zurich, as well as four times each in Vienna and Munich. In 2014, he also became the first pianist to present the cycle at the Salzburg Festival over one summer. To mark Beethoven’s 250th birthday, he performed all five piano concertos at the Vienna Musikverein with five different orchestras and conductors. Inspired by the genesis of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, he additionally commissioned a new cycle of variations on Diabelli’s waltzes by Brett Dean, Toshio Hosokawa, Philippe Manoury, Johannes Maria Staud, Tan Dun, and Jörg Widmann, among other composers. The New Diabelli Variations were premiered at the Vienna Musikverein in 2020 and subsequently presented on tours through Europe, Asia, and the USA and have been released on CD. Buchbinder has made more than 100 recordings and since 2019 has been an exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon, which released his most recent album featuring Max Reger’s Brahms transcriptions in the spring of 2024. Buchbinder’s interpretations are based on meticulous source research. As a passionate collector of historical scores, he owns 39 complete editions of the Beethoven sonatas alone, as well as numerous first editions and original editions of other works. Buchbinder has been Artistic Director of the Grafenegg Festival since 2007. He has also authored several books. His autobiography Da Capo was published in 2008, followed by My Beethoven: Life with the Master in 2014. And in 2020, to coincide with the premiere of the New Diabelli Variations, he published The Last Waltz: 33 Stories about Beethoven, Diabelli, and Piano Playing.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 18 November 1999 with a recital of works by Bach, Berg, Beethoven, and Schumann.

March 2024