Rudolf Buchbinder conducts and plays Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven

Rudolf Buchbinder is one of the legendary artists of our time. His piano playing is an unparalleled fusion of the authority of a career spanning more than sixty years with spirit and spontaneity.

His renditions of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works are considered to be exemplary. He has performed the thirty-two piano sonatas sixty times in cycles all over the world and developed the story of their interpretation over decades. He was the first pianist to play all Beethoven sonatas at the Salzburg Festival during a festival summer. A live recording is available on DVD.

In the 2019/20 season, for the first time in its 150-year history, the Musikverein Vienna was granting a single pianist, Rudolf Buchbinder, the honour of performing all five Beethoven piano concertos with five world class orchestras and conductors in a specially edited cycle. Buchbinder’s partners in this unprecedented constellation were the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Riccardo Muti and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Staatskapelle Dresden under their chief conductors Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann.

Together with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mariss Jansons, Rudolf Buchbinder also returned to the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Philharmonie Luxembourg and the Carnegie Hall New York as part of a tour.

A première was at the core of the Beethoven Year 2020. Based on Beethoven’s monumental Diabelli Variations op. 120, Rudolf Buchbinder initiated a new cycle of Diabelli Variations written for him by eleven leading contemporary composers of different generations and backgrounds. The New Diabelli Variations were commissioned by eleven concert promoters worldwide and with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. The world first recording of the New Diabelli Variations marked the beginning of Rudolf Buchbinder’s exclusive partnership with Deutsche Grammophon. The album “The Diabelli Project” was released in March 2020.

Rudolf Buchbinder is an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Buchbinder attaches great importance to source research. His private music collection comprises 39 complete editions of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas as well as an extensive archive of first prints. Numerous award-winning recordings document his career.