He had his first piano lessons when he was six. By the time he was twelve, he had been accepted into Karl-Heinz Kämmerling’s class at the Salzburg Mozarteum. Herbert Schuch is one of the great young hopes of the pianists’ guild. He attracted international attention when he won three important competitions within a single year: the Casagrande Competition, the London International Piano Competition and the International Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna.

In the process, Schuch – as he himself has said – was particularly influenced by his encounter with Alfred Brendel. Today the pianist works together with leading orchestras and appears regularly in recital at international festivals. For Berlin, Schuch has conceived a dramatic programme, focusing on the themes of “invocation” and “bells”.

Along with works by Liszt, Bach and Busoni he will play Tristan Murail’s tribute to Olivier Messiaen Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire, a work infused with “luminous echoes and clusters of chords in cheerful keys” (Murail). Here the French spectralist and Messiaen pupil is alluding to one of his former teacher’s earliest piano works, Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu (1929), which Schuch also includes in his programme. He closes his recital with a piece from Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs (1904-05), La Vallée des cloches, in which Ravel was inspired by the multitude of bells in Paris that pealed every day at noon.