After offering an artistic home last season to Lang Lang, a pianist whose media interest is already legendary, for the 2010/2011 season the orchestra has named as its eighth Pianist in Residence an artist who has occupied a secure position in the forefront of today’s virtuosos for years without any hype or hoopla: Leif Ove Andsnes.
Born in 1970 on the Norwegian island of Karmřy, Andsnes studied at the Bergen Conservatory with Jiří Hlinka and trained further with Jacques de Tičge. By the end of the 1980s he had attracted attention as a prizewinner at internationally renowned piano competitions, and after concerts in Norway he made his US debut. Engagements with the elite American orchestras followed, including those of Cleveland, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
In Europe, too, he became one of the leading artists on the concert scene in collaborations with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and London Symphony orchestra as well as with the major conductors and artists of our time. The chamber-music festival he co-founded in the southern Norwegian town of Risřr has, under his artistic directorship, become an important gathering place for musicians from all over the world, and in 2009 was listed among the “Top 10 Musical Events of the Year” by the New York Times.
Leif Ove Andsnes inaugurates his Berlin residency in September with a chamber concert which he will present with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker. In December – again in the Chamber Music Hall – he can be heard with his Canadian colleague Marc-André Hamelin, with whom he will be playing, among other works, Stravinsky’s four-hand piano version of the Rite of Spring. For his three concerts under the baton of Bernard Haitink in March, Andsnes has programmed Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. His activities as Pianist in Residence will be rounded off with a solo recital featuring Beethoven, Brahms and Schoenberg as well as one dedicated to the music of Mozart and Dvořák in which the artist will be joined by members of the Orchestra Academy.
