New Year's Concert with Boris Bloch

About the event

This New Year's Concert is dedicated to the pianist and composer Yuri Blinov (1975 – 2019) and to Christa Heimerl, a long-standing board member who passed away on 4 December 2019. In loving memory.

Born in Odessa, the pianist Boris Bloch has long been among the most important interpreters of classical and romantic piano music. Trained at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory in the master class of Dmitri Bashkirov, he developed a broad repertoire early on, ranging from Scarlatti and Bach, the Viennese classics, Chopin and Liszt, through German and Russian Romanticism to the major composers of the 20th century. Bloch's detailed knowledge of the piano literature, his comprehensive understanding of music history and its protagonists, his astonishing pianism and above all his strong artistic personality form the basis of the much-praised expressive depth, richness of colour, remarkable stylistic authenticity and incomparable “singing” quality of his playing.

After his studies in Moscow, Boris Bloch won several international piano competitions, including the coveted first prize at the “Ferruccio Busoni” Competition in Bolzano in 1978.

Several of Bloch's recordings are considered benchmarks, in particular his recordings of Liszt opera paraphrases, awarded the Grand Prix International du Disque Liszt of the Liszt Society Budapest and the Diapason d'Or Paris; his recording of Mussorgsky's piano works, likewise honoured in Paris with the Excellence Disque prize; and the live recordings of Mozart's “Coronation Concerto” and Tchaikovsky's Third Piano Concerto in its complete version.

In 2011 the ARS Produktion label launched a Boris Bloch edition. The first CD of the series was dedicated to Franz Liszt on the occasion of his 200th birthday and received the honorary prize of the Hungarian Liszt Society. Further CDs in this edition are devoted to Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Scarlatti, Schubert and J. S. Bach.

In 2012, in Raiding, Franz Liszt's birthplace, Boris Bloch performed all three volumes of the “Années de Pèlerinage” with sensational success. Gramola Vienna has released these and other works by Liszt in a 6-CD box. In recognition of his special commitment to Franz Liszt's legacy, the Austrian Liszt Society awarded him honorary membership in 2018.

For his many years of successful teaching at the Folkwang University he received the Music Education Prize of the Köhler Osbar Foundation and the City of Duisburg in 2007. Boris Bloch is frequently invited to serve as a juror at international competitions; he also regularly gives masterclasses in Germany and abroad and is honorary professor of the “Reinhold Glière” Music Institute in Kyiv.

Biographies