Biography
Pianist Steffen Schleiermacher ranks among Germany's foremost champions of contemporary music while maintaining an equally vigorous career as a composer whose honors encompass multiple awards and distinguished residencies. Beyond his solo work he maintains an active presence in chamber settings and as an accompanist, a role that produced a further entry in his extensive discography when he supported baritone Holger Falk on the 2024 release Georges Auric: Mélodies & Chansons.
Born in Halle in what was then East Germany, Schleiermacher traces a distant kinship to the nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. His training centered at the Musikhochschule Leipzig, where he pursued piano studies with Gerhard Erber, composition with Friedrich Schenker, and conducting under Günter Blumhagen; he also attended composition classes at the DDR Akademie der Künste and received private piano instruction from Aloys Kontarsky.
Initial acclaim arrived through composition: a 1985 prize at the Gaudeamus Competition and the 1989 Hanns Eisler Prize for his Concerto for viola and chamber ensemble. Residencies followed at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1992 and the Cité des Arts in Paris in 1998. Drawn to non-Western traditions, his works incorporate elements from Indonesian gamelan ensembles and Japanese classical forms. In the concert hall he has appeared as soloist with the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, among other leading groups. One of his earliest recordings, the recital The Bad Boys!, surveyed the American avant-garde figures George Antheil, Henry Cowell, and Leo Ornstein. To deepen his engagement with new music he established the Ensemble Avantgarde and has performed and documented works by contemporary Japanese and Indonesian composers.
His recorded output concentrates almost entirely on music from the early twentieth century onward. The 2003 album Hommage à Walter Spies paid tribute to the Dutch painter who energized Bali's modern art community. More than eighty releases, most issued on Germany's MDG label, include complete traversals of John Cage's piano music and of Satie's piano music, the sixth volume of the latter appearing in 2019; the Cage cycle constitutes the largest single portion of his catalog. Frequent collaborative work as an accompanist has encompassed a sequence of 2020s albums with baritone Holger Falk devoted to vocal pieces by the French 1920s collective known as Les Six, culminating in the 2024 installment Georges Auric: Mélodies & Chansons. Multiple ECHO Klassik awards have recognized his achievements.
Born in Halle in what was then East Germany, Schleiermacher traces a distant kinship to the nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. His training centered at the Musikhochschule Leipzig, where he pursued piano studies with Gerhard Erber, composition with Friedrich Schenker, and conducting under Günter Blumhagen; he also attended composition classes at the DDR Akademie der Künste and received private piano instruction from Aloys Kontarsky.
Initial acclaim arrived through composition: a 1985 prize at the Gaudeamus Competition and the 1989 Hanns Eisler Prize for his Concerto for viola and chamber ensemble. Residencies followed at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1992 and the Cité des Arts in Paris in 1998. Drawn to non-Western traditions, his works incorporate elements from Indonesian gamelan ensembles and Japanese classical forms. In the concert hall he has appeared as soloist with the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, among other leading groups. One of his earliest recordings, the recital The Bad Boys!, surveyed the American avant-garde figures George Antheil, Henry Cowell, and Leo Ornstein. To deepen his engagement with new music he established the Ensemble Avantgarde and has performed and documented works by contemporary Japanese and Indonesian composers.
His recorded output concentrates almost entirely on music from the early twentieth century onward. The 2003 album Hommage à Walter Spies paid tribute to the Dutch painter who energized Bali's modern art community. More than eighty releases, most issued on Germany's MDG label, include complete traversals of John Cage's piano music and of Satie's piano music, the sixth volume of the latter appearing in 2019; the Cage cycle constitutes the largest single portion of his catalog. Frequent collaborative work as an accompanist has encompassed a sequence of 2020s albums with baritone Holger Falk devoted to vocal pieces by the French 1920s collective known as Les Six, culminating in the 2024 installment Georges Auric: Mélodies & Chansons. Multiple ECHO Klassik awards have recognized his achievements.
Albums
Hans Jürgen von der Wense
2016
The Bad Boys!
2015
Christian Wolff: Early Piano Pieces
2008
Dane Rudhyar: Works For Piano
2005
Morton Feldman: Early Piano Works
2003
Soviet Avant-Garde, Vol. 1
2003
Soviet Avant-Garde, Vol. 2
1999
Enfants Terribles
1999
Soviet Avant-Garde
1995
Singles
