Konstanze Eickhorst – piano

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The pianist Konstanze Eickhorst is not a musician who is easily pigeonholed: she is a soloist, a chamber musician and a teacher. “These are the three pillars on which my musical life is built,” she said in a recently broadcast interview. She was a pupil of Karl-Heinz Kämmerling in Hanover and Vlado Perlemuter in Paris. Joachim Kaiser has praised her not only for her “immaculate command of piano technique”, but also for the “intensity of expression” that is her particular hallmark. The jury at the renowned Clara Haskil Competition thought so too, as did the jury of the Géza Anda Competition, at both of which she won first prize. She has also won prizes at the Toronto Bach Competition (in memoriam Glenn Gould) and at Belgium’s Concours Reine Elisabeth. She appears at many leading international festivals, including Lucerne, Montreux, Salzburg, Ravinia (Chicago) and Berlin. She has also performed with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich and others, with conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach, Andrew Davis, Peter Schneider, Manfred Honeck and Ingo Metzmacher. She has been privileged to work in a solo capacity with Sándor Végh and Ferdinand Leitner. She is a member of the Linos Ensemble, which performs in combinations ranging from duo to nonet in concert halls throughout the world and has numerous awards and CD recordings to its credit. Her strong interest in merging music and literature led to close collaboration with the late actor Karl Michael Vogler. Since 2010 she has performed with the actor Johanna Gastdorf. Alongside her activities as a solo pianist, Konstanze Eickhorst sees it as her mission to transmit the fruit of her experience to the younger generation of pianists. She was one of the youngest professors in the story of German music-academies when, in 1989, she embarked on her successful teaching career at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hanover. In 1998 the Musikhochschule Lübeck invited her to join its staff. Amongst her other activities Konstanze Eickhorst conducts master-classes for soloists and ensembles at the Académie Internationale d’été and is a jury member at national and international competitions. She has chaired the European Piano Competition at Bremen since 2007 and is in addition a member of the artistic organising committee.