Peter Rosel

Peter Rösel launched his pianistic career amid the Communist era in the former East Germany and maintains an active schedule into the early 2020s. His extensive discography includes the complete piano works of Brahms together with the full set of Beethoven sonatas.

Born February 2, 1945, in Dresden, Rösel grew up as the son of a conductor and a singer. Piano lessons began at age six. Exceptional promise led to studies at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory, first under Dmitri Bashkirov and subsequently under Lev Oborin.

Despite mounting East Bloc isolation, Rösel earned competition prizes, taking awards at the International Schumann Competition in 1963, the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1966, and the International Piano Competition in Montreal in 1968. Frequent sessions for the East German state label Eterna began in the late 1960s; many of those recordings later appeared on Berlin Classics during the twenty-first century. The year 1970 marked his first appearance with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Kurt Masur, the first of more than two hundred such concerts.

International recognition preceded the end of the East German state. Engagements have included the London Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, and the Staatskapelle Dresden. In 2005 Rösel presented the complete Beethoven piano concertos with the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo at Dresden’s Semperoper and has performed and recorded regularly in Japan. He has offered his full Beethoven sonata cycle in several countries, among them Japan, where the performances were captured for the Japanese King label beginning in 2012. Festival highlights encompass appearances at the Proms in London, the Salzburg Festival, and the Hollywood Bowl.

Senior status has scarcely diminished his schedule; the 2021–2022 season brought concerts with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Japan and performances at Dresden’s Kulturpalast. Most of his Western recordings have been made for Berlin Classics, among them a complete 1979 set of Rachmaninov piano concertos with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Kurt Sanderling, reissued on that label in 2023. By then his catalog contained at least sixty-five releases.