Rudolf Buchbinder

Rudolf Buchbinder, born in 1946 in Litoměřice (then Czechoslovakia) and raised in Vienna, is one of the senior statesmen of Austrian pianism and a fixture of the city’s musical life for more than half a century. He entered the Vienna Academy of Music at the age of five, its youngest-ever student, and has long been regarded as a leading interpreter of the Viennese Classical repertoire, above all Beethoven, whose complete piano sonatas and concertos he has performed and recorded many times over, and whose music he has championed in marathon cycles around the world. A scholar as well as a player, Buchbinder owns a large collection of historical editions and writings on the works he plays, and brings to them a combination of structural clarity, unfussy directness, and deep idiomatic authority. He appears regularly with the Vienna Philharmonic and the great orchestras of Europe and is closely associated with the Musikverein, where Viennese audiences have followed his playing across generations.