Peter Rösel

Pianist Peter Rösel launched his professional path amid the Communist period in the former East Germany and has sustained an active presence into the early 2020s. His extensive discography encompasses the full piano output of Brahms together with every Beethoven sonata.

Born in Dresden on February 2, 1945, Rösel grew up with a conductor father and a singer mother. He began piano studies at age six and, after demonstrating exceptional promise, traveled to Moscow for training at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, first under Dmitri Bashkirov and subsequently with Lev Oborin. Despite increasing East Bloc isolation, he secured awards at the International Schumann Competition in 1963, the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and the 1968 International Piano Competition in Montreal. From the late 1960s onward he recorded regularly for East Germany’s state-owned Eterna label, with numerous titles later reissued on Berlin Classics during the present century. His debut with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, then led by Kurt Masur, occurred in 1970 and marked the start of more than 200 subsequent engagements.

Rösel had already achieved international recognition before the East German state collapsed. Engagements followed with ensembles including the London Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, and the Staatskapelle Dresden. In 2005 he presented a complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo at Dresden’s Semperoper, while maintaining frequent concert and recording activity in Japan. He has given his full Beethoven sonata cycle in multiple countries, among them Japan, where the performances were captured for release on the King label beginning in 2012. Festival appearances have included the Proms in London, the Salzburg Festival, and the Hollywood Bowl. Advanced age produced minimal interruption; the 2021-2022 season brought performances with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Japan and recitals at Dresden’s Kulturpalast. Recordings issued in the West have appeared chiefly on Berlin Classics, among them a 1979 complete set of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos performed with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Kurt Sanderling and reissued on that label in 2023. The catalog then contained at least 65 entries.