Gerold Huber

Pianist Gerold Huber is best known for his work as an accompanist. He is particularly identified with the baritone Christian Gerhaher, with whom he has been teamed since the pair were students. Huber was born in Straubing, in Bavaria, in 1969. He attended the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, studying piano and vocal accompaniment. In his coursework for the latter, he attended a master class with the great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Another member of the class was Gerhaher, and from that meeting stemmed a long collaboration. Huber has also accompanied various other top-flight singers, including mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink, soprano Diana Damrau, and soprano Ruth Ziesak. He is also a member of a multi-artist song-performance group called Liedertafel, and he has played chamber music with the Artemis Quartet. As a solo pianist, he has given recitals in Munich and Regensburg and abroad in France and New Zealand. Huber also accompanies a variety of singers at German festivals, including the Rheingau Music Festival, the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, and the Schwetzingen Festival. In the U.S., he has appeared as an accompanist at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York. Huber has won several major awards, not only in collaboration with Gerhaher (the pair won an Echo Klassik Award in 2002 for their recording of Schubert's Die Winterreise, D. 911, and a Gramophone Award in the U.K. in 2006 for their album Abendbilder) but also as a solo player; he was a prizewinner at the Internationaler Klavierwettbewerb Johann Sebastian Bach Saarbrücken in 2001. Huber's discography, mostly with Gerhaher and other singers, is large. In 2017, he and Gerhaher released a recording of the rare Brahms spoken-musical work Die schöne Magelone; the pair also toured with the work to Munich, Heidelberg, and London. In 2019, he backed Constance Heller in an album of songs by composer Hans Sommer. He has continued to record chamber music, backing the Henschel Quartet that year in a recording of works by Schubert and Mendelssohn. Huber remained active during the COVID-19 pandemic, accompanying baritone Raoul Steffani and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená on the 2021 album Robert & Clara Schumann: Love's Spring on the Challenge Classics label. In 2022, he backed soprano Christiane Karg on an album of works by Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn on the BR Klassik label; he moved to Sony Classical in 2023, joining Gerhaher and tenor Piotr Beczała on a recording of Mahler's rarely-heard voice-and-piano version of Das Lied von der Erde. ~ James Manheim, Rovi