Biography

Pianist Peter Wittenberg comes from a Latvian family of musicians and received his first piano lessons at an early age. At the age of 16, he won the Bronislaw Kaper Prize of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Sergei Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto. Since then, Peter Wittenberg has been a guest worldwide on such renowned concert stages as the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, New York's Carnegie Weill Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the Athenaeum Bucharest, the Grossersaal of the Salzburg Mozarteum, and the Philharmonie Baden-Baden.

As a soloist, he has performed in orchestral concerts under conductors such as Stewart Robinson and José Luis García Asensio. Peter Wittenberg is particularly dedicated to string chamber music and regularly performs with violinists such as Wonhee Bae, Esmé Quartet, and Ziyu He, Altenberg Trio. He has also performed with partners such as the violinists Kirill Troussov, Gottfried von der Goltz, Levon Chilingirian, and Eszter Haffner, the violists William Coleman and Thomas Riebl, and the cellists Clemens Hagen, Raphaël Pidoux, Danjulo Ishizaka, Christian Poltéra, Louise Hopkins, Julius Berger, and Xenia Jankovic. As a Lied pianist, he has accompanied the soprano Ruby Hughes, the mezzo-soprano Kelly O'Connor and the baritone Anton Belov.

Peter Wittenberg completed his piano studies in the USA. He studied at Indiana University with Lev Vlassenko, at the Juilliard School of Music in New York with Jerome Lowenthal and also with Vitaly Margulis and Maurizio Pollini at the Accademia Chigiana. He has attended master classes with Dmitri Bashkirov, Halina Czerny-Stefanska, Fou T'song, Béla Siki and Lev Naumov, among others. As a postgraduate, he studied orchestral conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with conductors Alexander Polischuk and Ilya Musin. Peter Wittenberg has also taken part in chamber music master classes with Christoph Poppen, Gerhard Schulz, András Keller, Rainer Kussmaul, Heinrich Schiff and Paul Roczek. His musical experiences and collaboration with Clemens Hagen, Rainer Schmidt and members of the Hagen Quartet have given him important impulses. He is regularly engaged as a piano accompanist at well-known competitions such as the Salzburg International Mozart Competition.