Since he won the ARD Competition, Bernd Glemser has been in the first flight of the world’s pianists. A pupil of the Russian pianist and teacher Vitaliy Margulis, he soon found himself in the critical limelight after the remarkable feat of carrying off first and special prizes in no less than seventeen international competitions from 1981 onwards, including the Cortot Competition, the Rubinstein, the Tchaikovsky, Busoni, Callas, among other major contests, with critically acclaimed appearances in important musical centres throughout the world. In 1989 Bernd Glemser had the unique honour to be appointed Germany’s youngest professor by the Saarbrücken College of Music and the department of education there was obliged to remove him from the student register because of his new professorship, but by way of consolation he was offered the opportunity to take his outstanding exams within the following two years. His status is now such that he receives regular invitations to give concerts all over Europe, as well as in the United States, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, China, South America and Australia.
Bernd Glemser has an unusually wide-ranging repertoire, which places equal emphasis on contrapuntal music from Bach onwards, on the Romantic composers and on modern works. He has a special fondness for the highly virtuoso fin de siècle repertoire and the many arrangements left by composers like Liszt, Tausig, Godowski, Busoni and Rachmaninov. His recordings for Naxos began in 1992. Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.3 (8.550666) and two CDs with works by Schumann and Prokofiev were released in 1994. His first disc with Scriabin Sonatas (8.553158), and the complete Tchaikovsky Concertos (8.507002) were released in 1996 and early 1997. The complete cycle of Rachmaninov Concertos (8.505177) and of Scriabin and Prokofiev Sonatas were released in the period from 1999 to 2002. His compact disc recordings have been named CD of the Month on eleven occasions.
At the same time he has appeared on television at home and abroad, including an ARD prime-time television portrait. In summer 2003 he was honoured by the German President with the Federal Service Cross.
