Anton Kuerti

Pianist Anton Kuerti was born in Austria, grew up in the U.S., and has lived in Canada for most of his adult life. His teachers included Arthur Loesser, Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Rudolf Serkin. At the age of 11 he performed the Grieg Concerto with Arthur Fiedler, and, while still a student, he won the famous Leventritt Award.

Anton Kuerti has toured 39 countries, including Japan, Russia, and most European countries, and has performed with most major U.S. orchestras and conductors, such as the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony (Menuhin), Cleveland Orchestra (Szell), and the orchestras of Honolulu, Seattle, Montreal and San Francisco. His vast repertoire includes some 50 concertos, including one he composed himself.

In Canada Kuerti has appeared in 140 communities from coast to coast, and has played with every professional orchestra, including 39 concerts with the Toronto Symphony. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received numerous honourary doctorates. In 2007 he received two more prestigious awards: the Schumann Prize of the Schumann Gesellschaft in Germany, and the National Arts Prize of the Banff Centre in Canada.

Recent engagements included concerts with the orchestras of Toronto, Ottawa, St. Louis, Houston, Denver and Philadelphia, and concerts in Germany, New Zealand, China, Australia and Malaysia, where he performed 6 concerts at a Beethoven Festival. He has participated in leading festivals, and on many occasions has shown remarkable stamina, performing all 5 Beethoven Concertos plus the Choral Fantasy, or the last 5 Beethoven Piano Sonatas, in one extended concert. As a chamber musician, he has performed the major repertoire with such artists as Gidon Kremer, Yo-Yo Ma, Janos Starker, and the Cleveland, Guarneri, St. Lawrence and Tokyo Quartets.

Anton Kuerti is one of today's most recorded artists, having put on disc all the Beethoven Concertos and Sonatas, the Brahms and Schumann comcertos, the Schubert Sonatas and works by many other composers. His recordings are heard almost daily on the CBC. Kuerti's newest releases include a new version of the last 5 Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and a world premiere recording of two works for violin and piano by Carl Czerny. Gramophone magazine called his recent CD of the Schumann Piano Concerto, "a deeply memorable contribution to this concerto's recorded history".

CD Review (London) called him 'one of the truly great pianists of this century...stunningly played...poignantly beautiful...a superb Schubert player', while the Montreal La Presse wrote "Kuerti possesses this music - the "Third" [Beethoven] and all the other concertos - as though he had written it, even to the point of visually suggesting the composer

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