Bernd Glemser studied piano with Vitaly Margulis, a Russian. From the age of nineteen he entered many piano competitions and was placed in seventeen of these, including the Cortot Competition, the Rubinstein Competition, the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Busoni Competition in Italy. At the Sydney Piano Competition in 1985, where Glemser won second prize, New York Times critic Harold Schonberg was highly impressed, as were many European critics at Glemser’s debuts in Munich and Frankfurt as well as at many of the annual piano festivals. After winning the first European Pianists’ Prize and the Andor Foldes Prize Glemser began making recordings, and by the end of the decade had been appointed artist in residence at two festivals and opened the new concert hall in Shanghai.

Glemser now performs throughout the world in Europe, Canada, Japan, China, North and South America and Australia; and in 2002 and 2003 toured Brazil and Chile for the first time. He has appeared on television in Switzerland, China and Poland, and recent documentaries about Glemser have been televised in Germany. In the past few years he has worked with such conductors as Franz Welser-Möst, Herbert Blomstedt and Vladimir Fedoseyev, played Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor Op. 30 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Wolfgang Sawallisch, and toured the United States with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra.

Glemser’s repertoire is wide, but basically extends from Bach to the early twentieth century. His favourite works are those of the late nineteenth century by pianist-composers such as Franz Liszt, Carl Tausig, Leopold Godowsky and Ferrucio Busoni. He also excels in the Romantic concertos by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky and the major Russian pianist-composers such as Scriabin and Prokofiev.

Glemser has recorded for Koch and Claves, but most of his recordings are for Naxos for whom he has recorded since 1992. He has recorded the complete works for piano and orchestra by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, the complete piano sonatas by Prokofiev and Scriabin, and has released two volumes of a Schumann cycle. His Scriabin sonatas are particularly fine: he is one of the few pianists who play the main first section of the Sonata No. 5 pianissimo with the lightness of a feather. Glemser is expansive when necessary, and, as a critic has noted, has ‘…a masterly sense of the twin sides of Scriabin’s fastidious nature’. Equally exciting is his recording of the Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor Op. 19 and many of his interpretations of these works are amongst the best. His Prokofiev sonatas are also fine, yet some of the later ones may lack some of the weighty gravitas these works require.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).