Gerold Huber

Pianist Gerold Huber has built his reputation chiefly through his role supporting vocalists at the keyboard. His longest-running partnership is with baritone Christian Gerhaher, a collaboration that began during their student years.

Born in Straubing, Bavaria, in 1969, Huber enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, where he concentrated on piano and the art of vocal accompaniment. During a master class led by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau he first encountered Gerhaher, and the two musicians have worked together ever since. He has also served as pianist for mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink, soprano Diana Damrau, and soprano Ruth Ziesak. In addition, Huber belongs to the song-performance ensemble Liedertafel and has performed chamber music alongside the Artemis Quartet. As a recitalist he has appeared in Munich and Regensburg as well as in France and New Zealand. At German festivals he regularly accompanies singers at the Rheingau Music Festival, the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, and the Schwetzingen Festival; in the United States he has performed at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York.

Huber’s awards include joint honors with Gerhaher—an Echo Klassik Award in 2002 for their recording of Schubert’s Die Winterreise, D. 911, and a Gramophone Award in 2006 for the album Abendbilder—along with an individual prize he received as a prizewinner at the Internationaler Klavierwettbewerb Johann Sebastian Bach Saarbrücken in 2001. His extensive discography features numerous projects with Gerhaher and other singers. In 2017 the duo issued a recording of Brahms’s rarely programmed spoken-musical work Die schöne Magelone and later presented the piece in Munich, Heidelberg, and London. The following year Huber supported Constance Heller on an album devoted to songs by Hans Sommer. He also recorded Schubert and Mendelssohn works with the Henschel Quartet in 2019. During the COVID-19 pandemic he remained active, accompanying baritone Raoul Steffani and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená on the 2021 Challenge Classics release Robert & Clara Schumann: Love’s Spring. In 2022 he partnered with soprano Christiane Karg for an album of Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn songs issued by BR Klassik. He moved to Sony Classical in 2023 to join Gerhaher and tenor Piotr Beczała for a recording of Mahler’s infrequently heard voice-and-piano version of Das Lied von der Erde.