BTHVN2020 | Detmold: My Beethoven – Hartmut Schneider

Hartmut Schneider was born in 1960 in Friedrichshafen and already won numerous national and international prizes at a young age (e.g. the Brahms Competition in Hamburg or the Yamaha Competition in Stresa) as a piano student of Edgardo Sanchez. He later studied under Oleg Maisenberg at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart), graduating from his soloist class with distinction. Hartmut Schneider is the duo partner of the cellist Reinhard Latzko and has recorded many solo and chamber music works for radio. He gained international recognition as the permanent Lied accompanist of Hermann Prey during his final year, particularly with his successful performances at the Salzburg Festival in 1997 and at the Vienna Schubertiade in the Große Musikvereinssaal.

Hartmut Schneider first taught at the Trossingen University of Music (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Trossingen), before accepting a professorship for piano at the Detmold University of Music (Hochschule für Musik Detmold) in 2005, where he was shortly thereafter elected vice rector, a position that he held until 2008. The international press has attested him "exemplary subtlety and a seldom heard differentiated touch" (Die Presse, Vienna), "intensity, audacity, sovereignty" (Vaterland Lucerne) and "extraordinary poetry" (Journal de Genève).

It was only as a young man, after studying his sonata "Les Adieux", that Hartmut Schneider developed a close relationship with Beethoven. The "programme" of the sonata, for the first time, allowed him to feel an intuitive and emotional connection to Beethoven, whose music had previously seemed very abstract and structuralist to him. He has since invented his own programme or story for each Beethoven sonata – a source of great inspiration.

 

Programme and Performers:

Piano Sonata No. 26 in E flat major op. 81a "Les Adieux"

Simon Staub, Piano

Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major op. 102, no. 2

Alexander Gebert, Violoncello

Hartmut Schneider, Piano

 

Photo: © Private