Burkard Schliessmann is a German classical pianist and concert artist with an active international career. He attended the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and graduated with a Master's degree. He studied under several internationally recognized musical artists and participated in master classes conducted by Shura Cherkassky and Bruno Leonardo Gelber.
Career
Schliessmann was born in Aschaffenburg. He performed at Steinway Hall in New York and is an official artist of Steinway & Sons. He has performed as a recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral soloist throughout the world and has participated in music festivals in Europe, among these the Münchner Klaviersommer, the festival "Frankfurt Feste", the Valldemossa Chopin Festival and the Maurice Ravel Festival in Paris. He received invitations from orchestras like the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, hr-Sinfonieorchester, WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra Cologne, Symphony Orchestra Wuppertal and the New Philharmonic Westfalia, in addition to other orchestras.
He has received honors and awards for his performances and his musical recordings and has been the subject and guest artist on many radio and television programs. His repertoire comprises Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Scriabin, the Second Viennese School up to the Avantgarde.
Personal life
Schliessmann is also a professional scuba diver and serves as an Ambassador for the "Protecting of Our Ocean Planet" program of the Project AWARE Foundation. The inspiration of the variety of colours of the underwater world he converts into differentiated sounds in his artistic interpretations, a phenomenon called synesthesia. In several segments of an interview with Oliver Fraenzke in The New Listener entitled "Interview: Burkard Schliessmann", Schliessmann describes his experiences of these feelings and impressions.
He also is engaged in the study of philosophy and photography.
Musical style, interpretation and artistry
"Schliessmanns' approach to the piano, though guided by a piercing intellect, remains essentially intuitive", so a reviewer in the introduction to an interview in High Performance Review HPR, USA.
Schliessmann himself stated in a conversation about the Goldberg Variations with James Reel in 2008,
According to Phil Muse, "Schliessmann is essentially a romantic, and as such he is the last sort of pianist you would expect to just play the notes as written, without comment."
James Harrington argued in American Record Guide in 2010 that "Schliessmann arrives at his own unique interpretations, with reverence for the past (Cortot, Michelangeli, Rubinstein, and Horszowski especially). While each phrase is impeccably shaped, there is an overall thrust to each work that holds everything together. He uses rubato sparingly, and while he embraces the virtuosity in the music, it never overrides other musical content. After a half century of listening to a number of these works, I must say that Schliessmann shed new light on most of them."
Peter J. Rabinowitz described in Fanfare in 2011 Schliessmann "as a fiercely intellectual pianist." He added: He's intellectual in two senses. First, he approaches this music with a tremendous store of background knowledge – knowledge about the composers and their works, about their early receptions, about their critical writings, about their literary inspirations, and about the cultural milieu in which they found themselves. Second, he performs the music with a rigorous sense of the ways its details contribute to its form, both in terms of its overall architecture and in terms of its vertical structure. Not that he sounds anything like Pollini, much less Rosen (to mention just two other pianists often tagged as intellectuals); his playing is far lusher and less severe than Pollini's (listen to the gorgeous shifts in color in the Barcarolle), far more flexible than Rosen's. Still, if you're looking for playing with splashy virtuosity, heightened emotionality, and an extroverted interpretive style, you won't find it here.
On playing Bach, Schumann and Chopin
In 2008, Schliessmann said that he played Bach more than any other composer and that he had played the complete organ works at the age of 21 – and this by memory.