Piano
Biography:
| GrauSchumacher Piano Duo Andreas Grau · Götz SchumacherAndreas Grau and Götz Schumacher met in 1981 at the age of 15 and 16 with their piano teacher Friedemann Rieger in Reutlingen and have been working together as a piano duo ever since. In addition to studying at the music academies in Dortmund, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, they had lessons with Renate Werner, the Kontarsky brothers and Claude Helffer in Paris. From the beginning of the 1990s, numerous prizes led to extensive concert activities in Germany and abroad. Schwetzinger SWR Festival, Berliner Festwochen, Ultrasound, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Berlin Philharmonic, Cologne Philharmonic, Rheingau Music Festival, Piano Festival Ruhr, Lucerne Festival, Salzburg Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, La Roque d'Anthéron and Cité de la Musique. The duo works with well-known conductors such as Michael Gielen, Lothar Zagrosek, Emanuel Krivine, Heinz Holliger, Bertrand de Billy, Andrej Boreyko, David Robertson, Georges Prêtre and Zubin Mehta as well as with orchestras such as DSO Berlin, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, RSO Stuttgart , Bavarian State Orchestra, RSO Vienna and Orchester National de Lyon. For the duo, the tension between tradition and modernity is of central interest and the design principle of their program concepts. Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher therefore maintain an intensive exchange with contemporary composers such as Peter Eötvös, Wolfgang Rihm or Karlheinz Stockhausen († 2007), who worked with the duo for the development and recording of his monumental MANTRA for two pianists in close dialogue. The steadily growing discography of the duo documents an artistic openness, which is driven by the search for a lively repertoire. The arc ranges from Heinrich Schütz, Henry Purcell and Johann Sebastian Bach to the literature of the Classical and Romantic eras to the great modern and avant-garde works of Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, George Crumb, John Cage and Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Works for two pianos and orchestra are just as important to the duo as projects that involve other art forms, including, for example, the collaboration with the actor Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. |
Albums:
Purcell / Kurtág – Mozart / Busoni – Schubert – Scriabin Rachmaninoff:
Francis Poulenc, Colin McPhee, John Adams
