Peter Wittenberg

Peter Wittenberg is a senior piano lecturer at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. He has appeared internationally as a soloist and chamber musician in venues including the Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. A prizewinner of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Bronisław Kaper Award, he studied at Indiana University and the Juilliard School and is active internationally as a recitalist, Lied pianist and masterclass collaborator.

"Projected radiant overtones."
(New York Times)

Peter Wittenberg was born into a musical family of Latvian heritage. His father played viola, double bass and guitar, and his mother was an opera singer. He began studying the piano at an early age and, at 16, received the Bronisław Kaper Award from the Los Angeles Philharmonic for his performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.

He studied piano performance at Indiana University with Lev Vlassenko and at the Juilliard School in New York with Jerome Lowenthal. Chamber music studies with Bruce Brubaker, Jacob Lateiner and Samuel Sanders further shaped his artistic development. He also worked with Vitaly Margulis and with Maurizio Pollini at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. His conducting studies took him to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied with Alexander Polischuk and Ilya Musin.

He has taken part in masterclasses with Dmitri Bashkirov, Lev Naumov, Halina Czerny-Stefańska, Béla Siki and Fou Ts’ong, as well as chamber music masterclasses with Christoph Poppen, Gerhard Schulz, András Keller, Rainer Kussmaul, Heinrich Schiff and Paul Roczek. Musical collaborations with Clemens Hagen, Rainer Schmidt and members of the Hagen Quartet provided further artistic inspiration.

His recital appearances have included venues such as the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, the Großer Saal of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg, the Athenaeum in Bucharest, the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche in Munich, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York, and the Baden-Baden Philharmonie. As a concerto soloist he has performed under the direction of Stewart Robertson and José Luis Garcia. His performances have been broadcast internationally on Classic FM (UK), SWR (Germany), ORF (Austria), and WQXR and KUSC in the United States.

An active chamber musician, he performs regularly with violinists Wonhee Bae (Esmé Quartet) and Ziyu He (Altenberg Trio), and has collaborated with artists including Kirill Troussov, Gottfried von der Goltz, Eszter Haffner, Levon Chilingirian, Thomas Riebl, Clemens Hagen, Raphaël Pidoux, Christian Poltéra, Xenia Jankovic, Louise Hopkins and Julius Berger. He is also active as a Lied pianist, appearing in recital with Ruby Hughes, Ildikó Raimondi, Kelly O’Connor and Anton Belov.

In 2017 and 2018 he served as official pianist for Vadim Repin’s masterclasses at the Mozarteum University Salzburg and regularly collaborates in masterclasses with musicians including Maxim Vengerov, Mi-kyung Lee, Kirill Troussov, Gary Hoffman and Emmanuel Pahud.