Michael Korstick

Pianist Michael Korstick is known as a Beethoven player, but he is a versatile musician whose repertory extends to late 19th and 20th century music of various countries. Korstick's reputation has grown steadily since his debut in the mid-'70s. Since the beginning of the 21st century, he has amassed a substantial recording catalog that focuses on Beethoven but also includes recordings of unusual works by such composers as Darius Milhaud and Charles Koechlin. In 2024, he released an album of Brahms' two piano concertos with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Korstick was born on April 30, 1955, in Cologne in what was then West Germany. He took up the piano at nine, and by age 11, he had won the West German national Jugend musiziert competition. He attended the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, studying with Jürgen Tröster, and moved to Hannover in 1974 for studies with Hans Leygraf. That year, he also had master classes with Tatiana Nikolayeva in Moscow, which was uncommon in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Korstick made his debut in Cologne in 1975 with a Beethoven sonata recital and then went to further his education at the Juilliard School in New York, where his principal teacher was Sascha Gorodnitzki. He began his career in Germany in the early '80s and has been a fixture of the concert scene there and internationally ever since. A 2004 recording by Korstick featured Schubert's Piano Sonata in B flat major, D. 960, and Beethoven's Bagatelles, Op. 126. Part of the reason Korstick has been in such demand lies in the breadth of his repertory, which includes no fewer than 110 concertos. His work shows a focus on Beethoven and the major German Romantics but reaches into the music of many other countries; he has played music by such diverse composers as Rachmaninov, Bartók, Liszt, and Samuel Barber -- he performed the latter's piano concerto in Chile in 1992. Korstick has played cycles of the piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Bartók, and Prokofiev and has recorded many of these works, as well as a complete set of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. His body of work was referenced in the book Die großen Pianisten der Gegenwart ("Great Pianists of the Present Day"). Korstick has released more than 60 albums, mostly on German labels, including Oehms, CPO, and Hänssler Classic. On the latter, he issued a recording with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin of the two Brahms piano concertos, teaming with conductor Constantin Trinks. From 2014 to 2022, Korstick was a professor of piano at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz, Austria. ~ James Manheim, Rovi