Thomas Günther

* in Minden; pianist and university teacher; studied piano in Essen and Hanover with Boris Bloch and Karl-Heinz Kämmerling; professor of piano at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen; a focus on the rediscovery of ostracised composers of the 1920s. He owes important stimuli to the Schnabel pupils Maria Curcio in London and Konrad Wolff in New York. In 1980 he was admitted to the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, in 1981 he won the Folkwang-Wettbewerb, in 1983 he appeared for the first time as a soloist at the Berliner Festwochen and made his debut the following year in the Berliner Philharmonie with Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto. John Cage (“ONE for piano”), Dieter Schnebel and Juan Allende-Blin entrusted premieres to him. Since the end of the 1980s his work has been devoted to the piano music of Bach; he played both parts of the Wohltemperiertes Clavier, the Clavierübung II and the Goldberg Variations complete in several large German cities. A Streicher fortepiano of 1848 led him to the sonatas of Franz Schubert, and with the violinist Johannes Prelle he played all of Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and violin in Cologne at the end of the 1990s. In 2004 he founded the Internationaler Rotary-Klavierwettbewerb, of which he is the artistic director; he has held the professorship in Essen since 2007. A second focus is the forgotten piano music of the German-Jewish generation in exile, among them Erich Itor Kahn and Stefan Wolpe. Fifteen albums have connected him with Cybele since 2003. The furthest-reaching is the four-volume series Piano Works around Russian Futurism (2009–2016) with music by Obuchov, Wyschnegradsky, Protopopov, Lourié, Mosolov, Roslavets, Skrjabin and Strawinsky: it brought him the ECHO Klassik 2017 for the solo recording of the 20th/21st century and a nomination for the Jahrespreis 2016 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. Alongside it stand a three-volume Bach series on the Steinway D concert grand — Das Wohltemperierte Clavier Book I (2013), Clavierübung II and III (2015) and Book II (2025) — and the Franz Schubert Edition on the J. B. Streicher fortepiano of 1848 (Vol. 1 2006, Vols. 2 and 3 2025). There are also albums with the piano music of Juan Allende-Blin (2003) and the piano works of Erich Itor Kahn (2007), the harpsichord in the cello concertos of Schönberg and Monn (2013, a co-production with DeutschlandRadio Kultur) and audiobook productions of the label.