Biography
Gilead Mishory was born in 1960 in Jerusalem. He began to play piano when he was nine, but only at the age of twenty-one, after leaving the instrument for three years, did he decide to dedicate himself exclusively to music. After graduating from the Rubin Academy, he moved to Germany in 1984. On the recommendation of Alfred Brendel he completed his studies in Munich with Gerhard Oppitz and at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg with Hans Leygraf. He also studied musicology at Munich University.
Gilead Mishory is the first pianist to have recorded the complete piano works and chamber music with piano by Leoš Janáček. Other CDs with works by Haydn, Brahms, Bartók, his own compositions and numerous radio-recordings received instant critical acclaim. Enthusiastic reviews of the press describe him as a “magician of sound”, a “technically perfect poet of the piano” and a “pianist with a sense of sound, charm and esprit”.
Read full biography ↓
Mishory’s cycle Lider-Togbuch after poems by Abraham Sutzkever, premiered in 1998, was his breakthrough as a composer. His affinity to literature as a source of inspiration is also shown in his Hebrew Ballads to poems by Else Lasker-Schüler, Fugitive Pieces for piano, based on the novel by Anne Michaels, the string quartet Psalm, based on Paul Celan and Di Vayte Haymat Mayne for tenor and orchestra, to poems by Marc Chagall. His first opera, Isaac’s Youth, was completed in 2010. The first CD with Mishory’s own works was issued by NEOS in 2011.
Gilead Mishory is senior professor at the renowned University of Music in Freiburg and is head of the piano department there. He is regularly invited to give master classes all over the world.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.