Margarita Höhenrieder, the pianist. Edvard Grieg - CD Review, the 13th of September 2024

Concerto Op. 16 in A minor for piano and orchestra (Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, bandmaster Johathon Heyward); Suite No. 1 "Peer Gynt," arrangement for piano at four hands (Antti Siirala).

Premiere album released on the 26th of July

The star of this album is Margarita Höhenrieder - a 68-year-old German pianist and professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. Over the years, she has had a roaring concert activity and she has recorded 21 CDs as of today, six of which released at the German label Solo Musica.

Margarita Höhenrieder, born in 1956 in Munich, studied in her home town and at the Baltimore Conservatory, and, in 1981 she won the prestigious Busoni Competition in Bolzano, which paved her way to international success. She was a teacher in Würzburg and since 1991 has been teaching piano at the University of Music in Munich. She has sang as soloist for important orchestras in Europe and in the United States, such as the Gewandhaus Leipzig, the Munich and the New York Philharmonics, the Mozarteum Salzburg and the Mahler Chamber Orchestras, and she has collaborated with bandmasters such as Claudio Abbado, Lorin Maazel and Fabio Luisi. Her repertoire is vast and diverse, dominated by romantic music. Chopin, Grieg, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Liszt are among the composers who can be found in the discography of this eminent German pianist and teacher.

Her recent album is entitled "Northern Lights" and it includes two famous works by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg - the Concerto Op. 16 in A minor for piano and orchestra, recorded alongside the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie (bandmaster Jonathon Heyward), and the Peer Gynt Suite in an arrangement for piano at four hands, recorded with the help of the Finnish pianist Antti Siirala, as well as a contemporary work composed by the Icelandic composer Hjálmar Helgi Ragnarsson.