Biography (read more)
András Schiff was born in Budapest on 21 December 1953, the only child of a Jewish family, and began the piano at five. At the Franz Liszt Academy he studied with Elisabeth Vadász, then Pál Kadosa and Ferenc Rados — of whom he said there was never a positive word, and that from him he learned tone production, self-control and how to practise without wasting time — alongside classmates Zoltán Kocsis and Dezső Ránki, with summer courses under Tatiana Nikolayeva and Bella Davidovich. He left Hungary in 1979, took British citizenship, and was knighted in 2014 for services to music. He teaches at the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin and was the Israel Philharmonic’s first artist-in-residence.
Schiff’s recorded work centres on the keyboard’s structural repertoire — Bach above all, whose major cycles he has recorded and performs from memory without pedal affectation, alongside complete Beethoven sonatas, Schubert, Mozart, Haydn, Bartók and Janáček. His honours include the Grammy, the Gramophone Award, the Mozart Medal and the Royal Academy of Music’s Bach Prize. For a listener comparing recordings, Schiff stands as the analytical conscience of the modern piano: readings built from voicing and rhetoric rather than sonority, which makes them the natural counterpart to more romantic accounts of the same works.
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