Till Fellner

Austrian pianist Till Fellner’s international career was launched in 1993 when he won first prize in the renowned Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland. Over a period of more than two decades, he has become a sought-after guest with many of the world’s finest orchestras and at major international concert venues and festivals. Fellner has worked with Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Semyon Bychkov, Christoph von Dohnányi, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Sir Charles Mackerras, Kurt Masur and Kent Nagano, among many others. In the field of chamber music he regularly performs with the British tenor Mark Padmore. In recent years he has dedicated himself to two milestones of the piano repertoire: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. He performed the Beethoven cycle from 2008 to 2010 in New York, Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris and Vienna. Contemporary music is also of great importance to him; he has given the world premieres of works by Kit Armstrong, Harrison Birtwistle, Thomas Larcher and Alexander Stankovski. ECM, for whom Till Fellner is an exclusive recording artist, has released his recordings of the first book of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (2002) and his two and three-part inventions (Inventionen und Sinfonien, 2007), Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 4 & 5 (2008) with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Kent Nagano and, most recently, a CD of chamber music as an 80th birthday tribute to Sir Harrison Birtwistle, which includes his 2011 Trio for piano, violin and cello. In his native Vienna, Till Fellner studied with Helene Sedo-Stadler before going on to study privately with Alfred Brendel, Meira Farkas, Oleg Maisenberg and Claus-Christian Schuster. “Brendel has shown me through both his playing and teaching that the composer comes first and not the interpreter. So as a performer you should try to serve the composer.” Since autumn 2013, Fellner has taught a small number of students at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste.