Gerhard Oppitz
born in Frauenau in 1953, began playing the piano at the age of 5. At the young age of 11, it was Mozart's Piano Concerto in D minor with which he gave his first public concert - an incisive experience for the young Oppitz when the Stuttgart music academy professor Paul Buck was sitting among the audience. While he was still at school, Buck offered the young Oppitz a place in his music class. In 1971 Oppitz enrolled as a regular student in Stuttgart and moved to Munich in 1974 to attend Hugo Steuers' master class.

After Gerhard Oppitz became the first German to win the prestigious Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv only three years later, where the 90-year-old Rubinstein himself was one of the jury members, Oppitz's international career took off. Concert tours through the USA, Japan and Europe followed.

In 1978, the pianist finally recorded his first disc, which was followed by numerous other recordings and CD recordings. Another three years later, Oppitz took over the professorship at the Musikhochschule in Munich, which he held until 2013.

Important milestones in Oppitz's artistic career include numerous concerts in the world's most important musical metropolises. As a soloist, he has played with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the Israel Philharmonic and the London Orchestra, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the symphony orchestras of Detroit, San Francisco, Boston, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the orchestras of Paris and Munich.

His artistic output is also marked by his performance of complete cycles of works for solo piano, including Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, the sonatas of Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart, and numerous compositions by Brahms.

In 2009, Gerhard Oppitz was awarded the Brahms Prize of the Brahms Society Schleswig-Holstein - a prize that had honoured musical greats such as Leonard Bernstein and Lord Yehudi Menuhin. In 2014, he was awarded the Bavarian Order of Maximilian for Science and Art: the highest award of the Free State of Bavaria. Here, too, Gerhard Oppitz follows in the footsteps of none other than Johannes Brahms.

In addition, Gerhard Oppitz is an enthusiastic pilot who likes to climb into the plane himself and fly across Europe for his concerts.