Biography
Edward Auer has long been recognized as a leading interpreter of the works of Chopin. As the first American to win a prize in the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, he has returned to Poland for well over 20 concert tours, playing in every major city and with every major orchestra.
Auer has played solo recitals and concertos in over 30 countries on five continents, collaborating with such conductors as Zubin Mehta, Charles Dutoit, Herbert Blomstedt, Sergiu Comissiona and Riccardo Chailly.
Auer grew up in Los Angeles, where he studied piano with Aube Tzerko, a protégé of Artur Schnabel, and composition with Leonard Stein, a Schoenberg student. A precocious chamber musician and the son of an accomplished amateur violist, he was playing the Mozart piano quartets and the Schumann quintet with his father and his friends at the ripe old age of eight. He won several competitions in the Los Angeles area, and frequently appeared in concerts there, both as soloist and in chamber music.
Auer’s studies continued at the Juilliard School with Rosina Lhévinne and in Paris on a Fulbright Grant under Julius Katchen. Besides the Chopin Competition, Auer was a prizewinner in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the Beethoven competition in Vienna and the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels, and took First Prize in the Concours Marguerite Long in Paris. Now, years later, these and other contests regularly invite him to be on their juries.
For two years now, Mr. Auer has been at work on an ambitious series of recordings of the works of Chopin, to celebrate that composer’s 2010 bicentennial. As currently projected it will consist of at least eight volumes. The first, Chopin Nocturnes Volume 1, was released to great acclaim and a dazzling review from New York Concert Review’s Harris Goldsmith.
Edward Auer is on the Piano faculty at Indiana University Bloomington.
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