Rudolf Kehrer

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Rudolf Kehrer ( Russian Рудольф Рихардович Керер, scientific transliteration Rudol'f Richardovič Kerer ; born July 10, 1923 in Tiflis , Georgian SSR ; † October 29, 2013 in Zurich , Switzerland ) was a Russian-German classical pianist and piano teacher.

Life

Rudolf Kehrer was born in 1923 into a family of piano makers who had emigrated from Swabia , Germany. His talent was recognized early on, and a prelude in Moscow with Heinrich Neuhaus , the teacher of Emil Gilels and Swjatoslaw Richter , among others , had already been agreed when the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 . Rudolf Kehrer, his brother and his mother were exiled as Germans to a small village in southern Kazakhstan; Kehrer couldn't play the piano for thirteen years. In 1938 two uncles had already been arrested and taken to Stalin's prison camps ; one did not return, the other died shortly after being released of exhaustion. The father was arrested in 1939 and sentenced to ten years in a camp, where he died in 1943.

It was not until 1954, after Stalin's death, that Rudolf Kehrer was able to continue piano studies in Tashkent (Uzbekistan); he graduated with honors in 1957 and was appointed to a chair at the Tashkent Conservatory . With special permission (because of his age) he was allowed to take part in the All Union competition of music interpreters in Moscow in 1961, which he won with the highest possible number of points.

In the same year he was appointed to a chair at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory , an activity which he held until his appointment as visiting professor at the Vienna University of Music in 1990, and solo pianist with the Moscow Philharmonic.

In 1961, Kehrer began an intensive concert activity with a total of over 2000 concerts in more than 330 cities. In contrast to z. B. Svyatoslav Richter he had to - with a few exceptions - limit his activity to Eastern European countries including the GDR until perestroika and was only known to those in the West who were able to acquire his numerous records for the Soviet state company " Melodija ", some of which were in the GDR under the label "Eterna", in Western Europe under the label "Eurodisc" were available.

Since there was a crucial 13-year gap in Kehrer's piano training, his repertoire - z. B. in comparison with that of Richter and Gilels - rather small, but is well documented in studio productions and live recordings. In addition to the recordings of concerts in the GDR, which are located in the DRA Potsdam-Babelsberg, the tape of a Moscow concert is archived in the SWR archive; further recordings or studio productions can be found at WDR Cologne, Bayerischer Rundfunk and Österreichischer Rundfunk .

A concert in Moscow in 1998 is currently the only commercially available CD (Telos).

A detailed collection of his recordings is kept in the Rudolf Kehrer Archive in Overath .

Kehrer last lived in Zurich , Switzerland and died on October 29, 2013 in Berlin. His final resting place is in the columbarium of the so-called "Künstlerfriedhof" (III. Municipal Cemetery) in Berlin-Friedenau, Stubenrauchstrasse 43–45, 12161 Berlin, in the immediate vicinity of the graves of Marlene Dietrich and Helmut Newton.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The pianist Rudolf Kehrer is dead ( Memento from November 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Kehrer, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German classical pianist
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Tbilisi , Georgian SSR
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 2013
Place of death Zurich , Switzerland