Norbert Heller

Member of the Board of Directors

Norbert Heller was born in Český Těšín, where he made his first steps as a pianist. At the age of 15, he was accepted to the class of Proffesor Marta Toader at the Conservatory in Ostrava. As a student he gave numerous public concerts and recordings for Czech television and radio stations.

He has taken part in many piano competitions and has won the Ludwig van Beethoven International Piano Competition in Hradec nad Moravici in the Czech Republic. As one of the youngest participants, he took part in the prestigious Frederick Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland, and the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, Russia.

He continued studying piano with Professors Ivan Moravec and Jan Panenka at the Prague Academy of Music, where he also attended classes of chamber music led by Professor Josef Vlach. Other international competitions followed in Vienna, Austria, Vercelli and Bolzano, Italy.

Norbert Heller has performed in many countries in Europe and around the world including the United States (Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, Phoenix) and Japan (Nagoya, Osaka, Casals Hall in Tokyo). Besides recitals, he has regularly accompanied renowned instrumentalists and singers, and collaborated with various chamber ensembles. An impressive number of his recordings include Beethoven, Brahms, Smetana, Shostakovich, Mussorgsky, and others. He also plays an historic instrument called “the hammerklavier”.

His outstanding recording of Schubert’s sonatas played on a period Conrad Graff “hammerklavier” has won the Best Recording of the Year Award by the Czech Music Foundation. Norbert Heller is the first Czech pianist ever to record the complete Sonatas by Mozart. He is a former winner of the European Union’s Gustav Mahler Prize.

In 2003, Norbert partnered with violinist Gabriela Demeterova, with whom he recorded the complete set of Mozart’s Sonatas for Piano and Violin at Libochovice Castle. This recording was quite unique, as both artists played the historic instruments in accordance with the period’s tuning standard: Norbert played a unique hammerklavier from the workshop of Konrád Graf dated from 1820 – 1830, which is in the possession of Libochovice Castle and Gabriela Demeterova played a 1795 Kašpar Strnad violin.

Their first CD was released in 2003 and the complete set was finished in 2006. The whole project was sponsored and released by GZ Digital Media, a.s. at Loděnice u Prahy (Loděnice near Prague).