The career of pianist Peter Rösel began in the middle of the Communist era in what was then East Germany and the pianist remains active as of the early 2020s. He has a large recording catalog that includes the complete piano works of Brahms and the complete sonatas of Beethoven. Rösel was born on February 2, 1945, in Dresden. His father was a conductor, and his mother was a singer. Rösel took up the piano at six. Showing major talent, he was sent to Moscow to study at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Dmitri Bashkirov and then with Lev Oborin. Rösel excelled at competitions despite the growing isolation of the East Bloc, winning prizes at the International Schumann Competition in 1963, the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and the International Piano Competition in Montreal in 1968. By the late '60s, he was recording frequently for the state-owned Eterna record label in East Germany; many of those releases have been reissued by the Berlin Classics label in the 21st century. In 1970, Rösel made the first of what would become more than 200 appearances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, then under the direction of Kurt Masur. Even before the dissolution of the East German state, Rösel was internationally known. He has appeared with such major orchestras as the London Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, and the Staatskapelle Dresden. In 2005, he performed a complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo at the Semperoper opera house in Dresden, and he has performed and recorded frequently in Japan. He presented his complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas in several countries, including Japan, and he recorded the cycle there for release on Japan's King label beginning in 2012. Rösel has been a favorite at festival events and venues such as the Proms in London, the Salzburg Festival, and the Hollywood Bowl. Senior citizen status slowed him hardly at all; during the 2021-2022 season, he appeared in Japan with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra and in Dresden at the city's Kulturpalast. In the West, he has recorded mostly for Berlin Classics. A 1979 complete set of Rachmaninov's piano concertos, with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Kurt Sanderling, was reissued on that label in 2023. By that time, his recording catalog comprised at least 65 items. ~ James Manheim, Rovi