Peter Wittenberg was born into a musical family of Latvian heritage. His father played viola, double bass, and guitar, and his mother was an opera singer. He began piano studies at an early age and at the age of 16, he won the Bronislaw Kaper award from the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing the Prokofiev 2nd Piano Concerto. Since then he has performed in international concert halls such as the Frankfurt Alte Oper, the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, the Grossersaal of the Mozarteum Stiftung, the Athenaeum Bucharest, the Allerheiligen Hofkirche in Munich, Carnegie Weill Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City, the Baden-Baden Philharmonie, and many others.
"Projected radiant overtones."
- New York Times
As a soloist he has performed piano concertos under the baton of Maestros Stewart Robertson and José-Luis Garcia, and been heard internationally in radio broadcasts on Classic FM in London, SWR Germany, ORF Austria, and WQXR and KUSC in the United States. A devoted and passionate chamber musician, he performs regularly in recitals with the young international violinists Wonhee Bae of the Esmé Quartet and Ziyu He of the Altenberg Trio. He has also collaborated in recital with numerous partners such as violinists Kirill Troussov, Gottfried von der Goltz, Eszter Haffner, Levon Chilingirian, the violist Thomas Riebl, and cellists Clemens Hagen, Raphaël Pidoux, Christian Poltéra, Xenia Jankovic, Louise Hopkins, and Julius Berger, and performed extensively as a Lied pianist in recitals with sopranos Ruby Hughes, and Kammersängerin Ildiko Raimondi, mezzo-soprano Kelly O'Connor and baritone Anton Belov.
Piano studies at Indiana University with Lev Vlassenko, and at the Juilliard School of Music in New York with Jerome Lowenthal, chamber music with Bruce Brubaker, Jacob Lateiner and Samuel Sanders. Additional studies with Vitaly Margulis and with Maurizio Pollini at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. Conducting studies in the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia in the class of Alexander Polischuk and Ilya Musin. He has participated extensively in masterclasses with Dmitri Bashkirov, Lev Naumov, Halina Czerny-Stefanśka, Béla Siki, and Fou Ts’ong. In chamber music master classes with Christoph Poppen, Gerhard Schulz, András Keller, Rainer Kussmaul, Heinrich Schiff, and Paul Roczek. He received imporant musical impulses from musical encounters with Clemens Hagen, Rainer Schmidt, and members of the Hagen Quartet.
He was the official pianist for the Vadim Repin series of master classes at the University Mozarteum in 2017 and 2018, and regularly performs in the master classes of numerous world class musicians such as Maxim Vengerov, Mi-kyung Lee, Kirill Troussov, Gary Hoffman, and Emmanuel Pahud.
