© Moritz Schell
Christopher Hinterhuber – “One of the best, most fascinating piano albums of the year” wrote the Fono Forum about his recording of sonatas and rondos by CPE Bach. The English gramophone magazine chose his recording of works for piano and orchestra by Hummel as its “Editor’s Choice”, as did the five CDs of all of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. .
Through his recordings, which have appeared among others at Naxos, Wergo, Camerata Tokyo and Paladino, as well as through his worldwide concert activities, Christopher Hinterhuber has established himself internationally as a pianist with enormous bandwidth.
His teachers were Axel Papenberg at the Klagenfurt Conservatory and Rudolf Kehrer, Avo Kouyoumdjian and Heinz Medjimorec at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, followed by further studies at the Accademia pianistica “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola, Italy with Lazar Berman and Leonid Margarius. He owes important artistic inspiration to Oleg Maisenberg and Vladimir Ashkenazy, among others.
As a prizewinner of international competitions in Leipzig (Bach), Saarbrücken (Bach), Pretoria (Unisa), Zurich (Geza Anda) and Vienna (Beethoven), Christopher Hinterhuber regularly gave concerts at important festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival, the Styriarte in Graz, the Carinthian Summer in Ossiach with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yakov Kreizberg, Sylvain Cambreling, Kirill Karabits, Jakub Hrusa, Christian Arming, Bruno Weil, Andrés Orozco Estrada, Dennis Russell Davies, Bertrand de Billy, Ari Rasilainen, Adrian Leaper, Howard Griffiths, Hubert Soud Antant, Alfred Eschwé or Beat Furrer and orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Klangforum, the Vienna and Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the MDR Orchestra Leipzig, the Staatskapelle Weimar, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Orchestre Philharmonique Luxemburg and others.
In 2002-03 he represented Austria together with violinist Patricia Kopachinskaya in the series “Rising Stars” at Carnegie Hall and the most prominent European concert halls.
A special project was the recording in sound (Schubert, Rachmaninov, Schönberg) and image (Christopher Hinterhuber’s Hands) for the French-Austrian film “Die Klavierspielerin” after Elfriede Jelinek, directed by Michael Haneke (winning the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 2001).
An important part of his activity is chamber music, so he is a member of the Altenberg Trio Wien, which performs its own cycle at the Wiener Musikverein. Radio and television recordings for the ORF, DRS2, NHK, SWR and others round off his artistic activity and underline his outstanding position among the younger generation of Austrian pianists. He is Professor of Piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.