Volker Banfield
Volker Banfield ( born May 9, 1944 in Oberau village ) is a German pianist and professor at the University of Music and Theatre in Hamburg.
Life
Volker Banfield received six years of piano and organ lessons at age eight. In 1954, he was the age of ten full-time church organist in Prien am Chiemsee. In 1958 he received a scholarship, which he could begin his studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold. In 1960, he was the only German winner of the competition Jeunesse musicales in Berlin.
In 1965, two years after graduating from high school, he completed 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 Academy of Music in Munich. In 1975, he took over a piano professor in Hamburg.
After his return from the United States Banfield aroused by his virtuoso technique some attention, a technique that has not been credited parts of the arts section at that time a German and therefore surprised. They compared him with Horowitz.
Some tours have taken him across the U.S. and South America, the USSR, Iran and European countries such as Denmark, Switzerland and Austria. Many piano recitals and appearances with numerous orchestras were transmitted from radio stations. He has participated in over 90 recordings of different TV channels and recorded the Piano Concerto in E flat major by Franz Liszt for ZDF as well as the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Frank Martin and the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Eugen d' Albert for Swiss television.
From 2004 to 2007 Banfield was vice president of the Hamburg University.
Repertoire and reception
A feature Banfield is his fondness for music of the late 19th and especially the 20th century. He focused on virtuosic concert literature of Scriabin, Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d' Albert to the then relatively unexplored challenges of the new music, which Luboš Fiser, Detlev Müller -Siemens, Killmayer and Olivier Messiaen part of the Vingt regards sur l' enfant Jésus - he recorded five pieces for WERGO.
Banfield is considered to be a competent performer György Ligeti. He played the world premiere of nine of his etudes, which are only accessible to the few pianists, and the composer dedicated to him three of these works in person. Banfield described the month-long effort it had cost him to develop only a few minutes of this entirely new, highly rhythmically intricate music. It was necessary to hide familiar schemes to capture the fascinating game with African Pulsationsrhythmen and to realize the multi-dimensional time events. In a lecture Banfield speaks to the typical Ligeti for dealing with time and rhythm and explains the influences of Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow and the sub-Saharan music to Ligeti.
Banfield expanded his repertoire in the 1990s to works of the Romantic and played pieces by Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann, its three piano sonatas, the Abegg Variations, the Kreisleriana and the great C major Fantasy. Particularly for shots in the late Scriabin, the Rudepoêma of Villa-Lobos, the Nocturnes by Killmayer and Under Neonlight II of Müller -Siemens Banfield presents its thrilling virtuosity and both precise and focused interpretation.
With the same high level, the one expression in the Schumann recordings, sometimes there is a lack of romantic singing expressivity. A pianist, so Klaus Bennert that the intricate challenges of Ligeti's Etudes imagine, maybe can not get into the last Seelenabgründe by Schubert and Schumann. However would also artists such as Maurizio Pollini, who were known for their exchange between tradition and modernity, the whole width of the avant-garde spectrum with its new pianistic challenges can not cover. Without specialists such as Banfield the musical present would be poorer.