Herbert Schuch - Piano

BIOGRAPHY

Schuch celebrates a whole cosmos of refined interpretive artistry. (...) Thanks to the finest nuances of touch, each piece unfolds a luminosity that is as delicate as it is enduring. (...) Nothing seems artificial, mannered or put on for effect. Pure musicality in pianistic perfection.
– Pedro Obiera, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 10/2022

Herbert Schuch's artistic credo is not only to make music sound, but also to make it speak. With his strikingly conceived solo programmes and recordings of the highest artistic calibre, he creates a conversation between composer, performer and audience.

In 2022, Herbert Schuch released four new albums that underline his artistic diversity: In Search Of, a journey into the musical childhood of the piano duo Ensari/Schuch, an album together with clarinettist Sebastian Manz with works by Brahms, Schumann and Gade, and an all-Grieg-album together with cellist Daniel Müller-Schott, on which the duo presents not only the Sonata for Piano and Cello, but also a transcription of the Third Violin Sonata and selected songs by the composer arranged for cello. In November 2022 Schuch’s new solo CD Soulmates was released, on which he put works by Janáček and Schubert in dialogue with each other. In October 2023 he released a recording of Erwin Schulhoff’s Piano Concerto, composed exactly a century before, as well as of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the WDR Symphony Orchestra under Tung-Chieh Chuang.

During the 2024/25 season Herbert Schuch will be performing in the Great Concert Hall of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Bourgie Hall in Montreal, the Prinz­regententheater in Munich, at the Augsburg Mozart Festival and the Boswiler Sommer. He will appear as soloist with the Robert Schumann Philharmonic Orchestra Chemnitz, the Erfurt Phil­harmonic Orchestra and the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra.

After more than 20 award-winning CD recordings, Herbert Schuch is now dedicating himself to the two piano concertos by Johannes Brahms. Together with the Bochum Symphony Or­chestra under the direction of its chief conductor Tung-Chieh Chuang, his recording of these works will be released in early 2025 on the French label naïve, where Herbert Schuch is an exclusive artist.

Herbert Schuch has worked with a number of renowned orchestras, including the London Phil­harmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Or­chestra, the National Symphony Orchestra Taiwan, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bamberg Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic and the radio orchestras of hr, MDR, WDR, NDR Hannover, the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, the Danish Radio, the Orchestre National de Belgique as well as the Camerata Salzburg and the Festival Strings Lucerne. He is a regular guest at major venues and festivals, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Elbphilharmonie Ham­burg, the Philharmonie Cologne, the Salzburg Festival, the Festival Radio France Occitanie, the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Kissinger Sommer, the Heidelberger Frühling and the Schumann Festival Düsseldorf. Among the conductors with whom he has enjoyed successful associations are Pierre Boulez, Andrey Boreyko, Douglas Boyd, Lawrence Foster, Gustavo Gimeno, Reinhard Goebel, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Eivind Gullberg Jensen, Jakub Hrůša, Jun Märkl, Riccardo Minasi, Kent Nagano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Jonathan Nott, Markus Poschner, Michael Sanderling, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Markus Stenz.

Herbert Schuch was born in 1979 in Timișoara, Romania. He had his first piano lessons in his home town before his family moved to Germany in 1988, where he has lived ever since. He continued his musical studies with Kurt Hantsch and then with Prof. Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Recently, Herbert Schuch has been especially influenced by his encounters and work with Alfred Brendel. He created an international stir when he won three major competitions in just one year: the Casagrande Competition, the London International Piano Competition and the International Beethoven Competition in Vienna. Herbert Schuch, who as a child himself played violin for 10 years, shares his passion for chamber music on the stage with musicians such as Nicolas Altstaedt, Julia Fischer, Maximilian Hornung, Sebastian Manz and Daniel Müller-Schott. His piano duo with pianist Gülru Ensari, playing both four-handed repertoire on one piano and on two pianos, has successfully performed at many inter­national venues and issued two critically-acclaimed CD recordings with repertoire ranging from Mozart to Bernd Alois Zimmermann (2017 and 2018, CAvi music) In addition to his performing activities, Herbert Schuch is also involved with “Rhapsody in School”, an organisation founded by Lars Vogt to promote classical music education in schools.

Status: January 2025