Hardy Rittner
Born in Rüsselsheim in 1981, Hardy Rittner had his first piano lessons at the age of 4 and began his study of the piano and fortepiano in 1998 at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg in the classes of Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and Siegbert Rampe. After obtaining his diploma there in 2003 with distinction, he continued his studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK) with Klaus Hellwig and graduated in 2010 with his concert examination for which he played the Piano Concerto by Arnold Schönberg. He is currently pursuing advanced studies in his second main subject, theory of music, which he is studying with Prof. Hartmut Fladt of the UdK.
Hardy Rittner has attended master classes with Paul Badura-Skoda, Dominique Merlet, Christian Zacharias and Andrey Gavrilov and has received significant artistic encouragement from Maria João Pires, Sylvain Cambreling, Ivo Pogorelich and Krystian Zimerman. Since May 2009 he has benefited from assistance in the stART programme of Bayer Kultur.
Concerts take him to almost all the countries of Europe, the USA, South Korea and Taiwan, where he made his debut in the National Concert Hall Taipeh during a 2001 tour. In summer 2007 Hardy Rittner was invited by the German Federal President to give a concert in his residence, Schloss Bellevue, and he has just recently made his successful debuts in sold-out halls of the Berlin Konzerthaus at the Gendarmenmarkt and the Rudolph Oetker Hall in Bielefeld.
Hardy Rittner has been working with MDG since 2007. His Brahms CDs "Early Piano Works" - the world's first recordings of early keyboard works by Brahms on original pianofortes of the period (J.B. Streicher, 1851 and Ignaz Bösendorfer, 1849/50) - received exceptional reviews in the international press and numerous awards; his most recent recording of Arnold Schönberg's complete piano works followed suit.
Hardy Rittner received the ECHO Klassik Prize of the German music industry as "Young Newcomer of the Year" in 2009 and for the complete Schoenberg recording in 2010.
