Piano Sonatas Vol. 2: No 1-3 (G. Oppitz)

BEETHOVEN Ludwig van - Piano Sonatas Vol. 2: No 1-3 (G. Oppitz)

Hänssler Classic is proud to announce the latest volume in a major new Beethoven Sonata cycle, performed by Gerhard Oppitz. Throughout his distinguished career, Oppitz has established his deep understanding of Beethoven’s idiom and now brings a lifetime of experience to commit these works to disc. The current disc features the three piano sonatas op. 2, published in 1794. Beethoven dedicated these three works of to his revered teacher Joseph Haydn, who was impressed with Beethoven’s early accomplishments. Here we see an important link to Beethoven’s temperament and social self-image, in whose life the most energetic perspectives were sympathetic to revolutionary views. The composer as a free citizen, who is allowed to move boldly through the variable structure of the sonata in full self-awareness, who makes this form his own and breathes new meaning into it.
Gerhard Oppitz was born in Frauenau (in the Bavarian Forest) in 1953. At the age of five, he began to play piano and debuted with a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor when he was eleven. Oppitz received his formal training in Stuttgart and Munich starting in 1966 with professors Paul Buck and Hugo Steurer, and later with Wilhelm Kempff, concentrating on the works of Beethoven. In 1977, he was awarded first prize at the Artur Rubinstein Competition in Israel. Oppitz’s main interest is the classical-romantic repertoire although he has always devoted himself to music of the twentieth century. Oppitz is widely renown and respected for his programming major repertoire and cycles, such as Bach’s »Wohltemperiertes Klavier«, Mozart’s eighteen sonatas, Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, all the solo works by Schubert and Brahms’ complete piano works. Since 1981, he has been teaching post-graduate students at the Academy of Music in Munich.