Volker Banfield

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Volker Banfield (born May 9, 1944 in Oberaudorf ) is a German pianist and professor at the University of Music and Theater in Hamburg .

Life

Volker Banfield received piano lessons at the age of six and organ lessons at the age of eight. In 1954, when he was ten years old, he became a full-time church organist in Prien am Chiemsee . In 1958 he received a scholarship with which he could begin studying at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold . In 1960 he was the only German winner of the Jeunesses musicales competition in Berlin .

In 1965, two years after graduating from high school, he finished his studies in Detmold and went to the United States . There he first studied with Adele Marcus at the Juilliard School in New York City; In 1968 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin and studied with Leonard Shure.

In 1972 he returned to Germany and became a lecturer at the Musikhochschule in Munich . In 1975 he took over a piano professorship in Hamburg .

After his return from the United States, Banfield attracted some attention with his highly virtuoso technique, a technique that parts of the feature pages of the time did not trust a German and was therefore surprising. He was compared to Horowitz .

Several tours have taken him through the USA and South America, the USSR , Iran and European countries such as Denmark, Switzerland and Austria . Many piano recitals and performances with numerous orchestras were broadcast by radio stations. He was involved in over 90 recordings by various broadcasters and recorded the Piano Concerto in E flat major by Franz Liszt for ZDF as well as the 2nd Piano Concerto by Frank Martin and the 2nd Piano Concerto by Eugen d'Albert for Swiss television.

From 2004 to 2007, Banfield was Vice President of the Hamburg University.

Repertoire and reception

A characteristic of Banfield is his fondness for music of the late 19th and especially 20th century. He concentrated on virtuoso concert literature by Scriabin , Ferruccio Busoni and Eugen d´Albert up to the then still quite untapped challenges of new music , to which Luboš Fišer , Detlev Müller-Siemens , Wilhelm Killmayer and Olivier Messiaen belong, from his Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus he recorded five pieces for WERGO .

Banfield is considered a competent interpreter of György Ligeti . He premiered nine of his études, which are only accessible to a few pianists, and the composer dedicated three of these works to him personally. Banfield described the months of effort it had cost him to work only a few minutes of this completely new, rhythmically highly complex music. It was necessary to fade out familiar schemes in order to grasp the fascinating game with African pulsation rhythms and to be able to realize the multidimensional events of the day . In a lecture, Banfield addresses Ligeti's typical handling of time and rhythm and explains the influences of the Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow and sub-Saharan music on Ligeti.

Banfield expanded his repertoire in the 1990s to include works of the Romantic period and recorded pieces by Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann , including his three piano sonatas, the Abegg Variations , the Kreisleriana and the great C major Fantasy. Especially in recordings of the late Scriabin, the Rudepoema by Villa-Lobos , the Nocturnes by Killmayer and Under Neonlight II by Müller-Siemens, Banfield presents his gripping virtuosity and the precise and concentrated interpretation.

With the unchanged high level that is expressed in the Schumann recordings, there is sometimes a lack of romantic, singing expressiveness. According to Klaus Bennert, a pianist who faces the intricate challenges of Ligeti's Etudes may not be able to penetrate the last depths of the soul of Schubert and Schumann. However, even artists like Maurizio Pollini , who are known for their alternation between traditional and modern, would not be able to cover the entire breadth of the avant-garde spectrum with its new pianistic challenges. Without specialists like Banfield, the musical present would be poorer.

Honors

  • 1988 Diapason d'Or (Paris) for the recording of Ferruccio Busoni's piano concerto
  • 2000 Full member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg
  • 2009 full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts
  • 2009 Medal of Honor from the Hamburg University of Music and Theater

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Biographical information from: Ingo Harden, Gregor Willmes PianistenProfile 600 performers: Their biography, their style, their recordings, Volker Banfield, p. 53, Bärenreiter, Kassel 2008
  2. ↑ Neue Musikzeitung, university professor and pianist Volker Banfield turns 65
  3. ↑ Klaus Bennert in: Joachim Kaiser Great Pianists in Our Time , New Pluralism, p. 316. Piper, Munich 2004.
  4. ↑ Banfield, downloads (PDF; 38 kB)
  5. ↑ Klaus Bennert in: Joachim Kaiser Great Pianists in Our Time , ibid.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Banfield, Volker
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pianist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberaudorf