About
The outstanding Munich pianist Margarita Höhenrieder is highly esteemed in professional circles. As a soloist, Margarita Höhenrieder has performed with the conductors Kirill Petrenko, Claudio Abbado, Lorin Maazel, James Levine, Riccardo Chailly, Fabio Luisi and with orchestras such as the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Munich Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Saxon Staatskapelle Dresden, the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
The piano is the laureate of many international piano competitions since her childhood in the blood. At the age of eleven, she gives her first piano recital. She studies with Anna Stadler and Ludwig Hoffmann in Munich and later with the legendary American pianist Leon Fleisher in Baltimore, USA. She also owes significant artistic impulses to friendship and cooperation with Alfred Brendel.
In 1981, Margarita Höhenrieder wins the first prize in the major BUSONI competition in Bolzano and joins the list of other BUSONI award winners, such as Martha Argerich and Jörg Demus. From then on her artistic career will increasingly take her to the great music centers of the world such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Salzburg, Mexico City and New York.
At the age of 28, Margarita Höhenrieder becomes the youngest piano professor in Germany at the Musikhochschule Würzburg. Since 1991 she teaches as a professor at the Musikhochschule Munich. Here she passes on her artistic experience to young, gifted pianists.
Contemporary music is open to the pianist. A long-standing friendship connected them with Harald Genzmer. He dedicated her u.a. the Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, which she premiered together with Guy Touvron and the Württembergisches Kammerorchester and recorded on CD. Harald Genzmer's last great work, a fantasy of farewell entitled "Like a Dream on the Edge of Infinity" for piano and flute, was also dedicated to the artist. In 2009, Margarita Höhenrieder and the solo flutist of the Berlin Philharmonic, Emmanuel Pahud, will premiere in Rome and play it on CD. Further chamber music recordings u.a. with artists such as Julius Berger, Peter Sadlo and the chamber ensemble of the Saxon Staatskapelle Dresden are published.
On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the city of Friedrichshafen, an extraordinary collaboration will take place in July 2011: Margarita Höhenrieder and the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn are giving a concert in the Dornier Museum amidst numerous, impressive aircraft exhibits.
In addition to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, her great love is romanticism. The mutual inspiration of the artist couple Clara and Robert Schumann fascinates her so much that she publishes their two A minor piano concertos together on one CD.
DVD concert recordings of the first four piano concertos by Beethoven follow: The first concert of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Fabio Luisi, the other two concertos with the Kammerphilharmonie in the Zollverein World Heritage Site in Essen (2014) and with the Württembergisches Kammerorchester im Max. Littmann-Saal in Bad Kissingen (2015) under her former teacher and mentor, the American pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher. About him and his teacher Artur Schnabel leads the key track back to Beethoven's immediate pupil Carl Czerny - and thus to Beethoven.
In autumn 2018, the fourth piano concerto will be recorded in Bamberg.
The joint project with the internationally acclaimed painter Bernd Zimmer: "Two Left Hands" finds great enthusiasm among the audience. In this extraordinary performance, Bernd Zimmer only paints with his left hand - Margarita Höhenrieder accompanies him on the piano with only her left hand.