Christoph Ullrich
Biography Christoph Ullrich
Christoph Ullrich
The pianist Christoph Ullrich is always on the lookout for a lively and unconventional engagement with the audience. This leads to interesting and contrasting solo and chamber music programs, but also to the development of new program forms. The thematically very dense musical-literary programs with the BonaNox ensemble, the music theater-related concepts for children's concerts as part of laterna musica and his concert idea "Alchemy of Sound" stand for this.
Born in Göttingen, Ullrich studied with Leonard Hokanson, Claude Frank and Rudolf Buchbinder. He has lived in Frankfurt am Main since he was 8 years old.
Ullrich's multifaceted repertoire includes more than 400 works of all eras and styles since Bach.
Concert tours as a soloist, chamber musician and accompanist have taken him to many European countries, to South and North America, Asia and to international festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Beethoven Festival Bonn, the Ludwigsburg Castle Festival, the Bach Week in Ansbach, the Bach Festival in Leipzig, the Schubertiade in Feldkirch, the Heidelberg Spring, the Mozart Festival in Würzburg, the Schwetzingen Mozart Festival, the Cambridge Music Festival, the Lower Saxony Music Days, the Brandenburg Summer Concerts and the North Hesse Music Summer. He performed with major orchestras.
In addition to recording concerts for radio and television, Ullrich has played the pianist in several TV productions.
His CD recordings include piano works by Bach, Mozart and Schubert, musical and literary programs - The Four Elements ("Water", "Fire", "Air", "Earth"), "Night", "Janus Head" and "Dream Fever" – the complete works for cello and piano by Friedrich Kiel with cellist Hans Zentgraf and Franz Schubert’s Winterreise with baritone Matthias Horn.
Since 2011, Ullrich has been recording all of Domenico Scarlatti's 555 sonatas on CD together with the Tacet label. For the first time, the series will be heard in groups of 30 sonatas in the order Scarlatti intended. 228 sonatas have been recorded up to April 2018.
"Christoph Ullrich presents Schubert's piano sonatas in significant and impressively vivid interpretations." Joachim Kaiser
“Everything that is known, everything that has been learned appears purified in Ullrich's awakening of the French Suites and removed from any pianistic showmanship. He circles around, touches Bach's piano works in two senses of the word – definitely in the person of a seeing, feeling, yes, always amazed rebirth helper, who this music set in motion early on.” Peter Cossé
About the Scarlatti sonatas: “You always have the feeling that Ullrich himself is curious about the secrets of the next sonata. Unlike Horowitz, who eavesdropped on the inner eccentricity of the pieces, or Christian Zacharias, who liberated them from the air of being merely glamorous, Ullrich waits for the moment when the music begins to soar: as if it were one and double, Goethe's Gingko-Biloba -Sheet right away.” Mirko Weber, Die Zeit
“Ullrich's readings offer nothing short of a celebration of nuance and subtlety. His art with an affinity for detail knows hundreds of shades, his pianistic potential knows no bounds. Against this background, “Volume 2″ of the Scarlatti project stands for more than just Scarlatti exegesis: it is a homage to the modern concert grand piano and its possibilities.” Martin Hoffmeister, mdr culture
