- Subjects
- Piano
- Teaching locations
- St. Georgen
Gabriele König received an intensive musical training at the eleven-year specialist school for exceptionally gifted children — the lyceum attached to the Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St. Petersburg. She then graduated from the state conservatory with distinction, with concert diploma and state examinations as a concert pianist, piano teacher, concert chamber musician and concert song accompanist. During her studies she won first prize in the unique international sight-reading piano competition, in which only contemporary piano literature was played at sight. Further study at the state college of philology followed, completed with the academic degree of Licenciatus philologiae.
The pianist has won six international piano competitions and has given concerts in the Czech Republic, Italy, France, Lithuania, the Russian Federation, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the USA. She has taught at the Jugendmusikschule St. Georgen-Furtwangen e.V. since 1991 and has trained more than 450 people in piano, of whom 214 (as at 2020) have become prizewinners at international piano competitions in Italy, Lithuania, France, Germany and the Netherlands and at „Jugend musiziert“ up to national level. G. König has given more than 35 concerts as a soloist with various orchestras in Germany and abroad and has made world premiere recordings of works by Johann Baptist Cramer and Reinhold Glière. She also arranges orchestral and other works for unusual forces, for four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen and sixteen hands and for two to eight pianos; interest in these has been particularly strong in Japan and Canada.
Since 1999 G. König has also been the organiser and director of the Baden piano étude competition, the International Reinhold Glière Piano Competition and the International Johann Baptist Cramer Piano Competition, having run 35 competitions in total (as at 2020). The well-known contemporary composer Barbara Heller from Darmstadt dedicated 50 études, „Hand in Hand“, to the founder of the Baden piano étude competition; the score with its personal dedication was published by Schott in 2018. As a director, Gabriele König was invited to Barcelona in 2018 to take part in the conference of the directors of all international piano competitions. The international piano competitions have brought over 1,600 artists from 43 countries and all five continents to St. Georgen in the Black Forest. In January 2019 Gabriele König was awarded the Staufer Medal by the Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, for outstanding service to the state. More information at www.koenig-klavier.info