Pianist *Anton Kuerti* was born in Austria, grew up in the U.S., and has lived in Canada for most of his adult life. His teachers included Arthur Loesser, Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Rudolf Serkin. At the age of 11 he performed the Grieg Concerto with Arthur Fiedler, and, while still a student, he won the famous Leventritt Award.
Anton Kuerti has toured 39 countries, including Japan, Russia, and most European countries, and has performed with most major U.S. orchestras and conductors, such as the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony (Menuhin), Cleveland Orchestra (Szell), and the orchestras of Honolulu, Denver, Seattle, Montreal and San Francisco. His vast repertoire includes some 50 concertos, including one he composed himself.
In Canada Kuerti has appeared in 140 communities from coast to coast, and has played with every professional orchestra, including 39 concerts with the Toronto Symphony. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received numerous honourary doctorates.
Recent engagements included concerts with the orchestras of Toronto, Ottawa, St. Louis, Houston, and Philadelphia, and concerts in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia, where he performed 6 concerts at a Beethoven Festival. He has participated in leading festivals, and on many occasions has shown remarkable stamina, performing all 5 Beethoven Concertos plus the Choral Fantasy, or the last 5 Beethoven Piano Sonatas, in one extended concert. As a chamber musician, he has performed the major repertoire with such artists as Gidon Kremer, Yo-Yo Ma, Janos Starker, and the Cleveland, Guarneri, and Tokyo Quartets.
Anton Kuerti is one of today’s most recorded artists, having put on disc all the Beethoven Concertos and Sonatas, the Schubert Sonatas and works by many other composers. His recordings are heard almost daily on the CBC. Kuerti’s newest releases include a 3 CD Brahms set of the Piano Concertos and solo works, a new version of the last 5 Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and a world premiere recording of two works for violin and piano by Carl Czerny, a composer whose revival he has been actively promoting – he directed a 7 concert Festival of Czerny’s music in Edmonton Alberta in 2002. Gramophone magazine called his recent CD of the Schumann Piano Concerto, “a deeply memorable contribution to this concerto’s recorded history”.
A critic for the U.S. magazine Fanfare wrote simply that ‘Kuerti is the best pianist currently playing’. CD Review (London) called him ‘one of the truly great pianists of this century…stunningly played…poignantly beautiful…a superb Schubert player’, while the Montreal La Presse wrote “Kuerti possesses this music – the “Third” [Beethoven] and all the other concertos – as though he had written it, even to the point of visually suggesting the composer.”
