© Elsa Okazaki
Department Head
Teacher
Univ.-Prof.
Andreas Groethuysen
After graduating from high school, Andreas Groethuysen (*1956 in Munich) initially focused on various academic fields (philosophy, medicine) before he was finally drawn to music. He began studying the piano with Ludwig Hoffmann at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. Funded by the "Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes", after the state examination and three years in the master class, he went to London for a year to deepen his studies with Peter Feuchtwanger. At the end of his studies, he was admitted to the "Federal selection of concerts by young artists", which included numerous concerts - solo concerts, chamber music and orchestral concerts - throughout the Federal Republic. After a few years of performing as a soloist, Groethuysen then formed a piano duo with Yaara Tal, which has since become the focus of his artistic activity. Since the early 1990s, the duo has performed in most European countries, in Israel, Japan, China, North and South America also active in international concert life. It was able to present itself in the world's most renowned event frameworks such as the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Philharmonie Berlin, Cologne and Munich, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Musikhalle Hamburg, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the Lucerne Festival, the Teatro alla Scala Milan, the Frick Collection New York, the Forbidden City Concert Hall Beijing, the La Roque d'Anthéron Piano Festival, the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Wiener Musikverein, the Tonhalle Zürich etc. An exclusive collaboration with the record company SONY CLASSICAL enabled the duo to produce a whole series of more than 30 CDs, which have met with great response from the public and the press internationally, have been awarded numerous prizes (including ten times the "Prize of the German Record Critics", five times the "Echo Prize", and the "Cannes Classical Award") and have enriched the market with a number of first recordings. The focal points of the publications certainly include the recordings of the complete works of Franz Schubert and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Andreas Groethuysen has repeatedly been invited to sit on the juries of national and international competitions, including several times as chairman of the jury at the ARD competition in the piano duo category. For many years, Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen concentrated their educational activities on master classes at home and abroad. In 1995, the educational channel of Japanese television NHK produced an eight-part series of piano duo lessons with the duo. From 2004 the duo Tal & Groethuysen a master class piano duo at the University of Music and Theater in Munich. And since October 2014 Andreas Groethuysen has been leading a class for solo piano and, together with Yaara Tal, the master's degree in piano duo at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg.
