The linguistically mixed title Festas Suramericanas (Portuguese-Spanish) already suggests that this recording by Andreas Woyke with piano music by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Alberto Ginastera takes us into the realms of Brazil and Argentina. The release combines eruptive wildness and fragile tenderness of this strongly folklore-influenced music to untamed joy of life! The German pianist, Andreas Woyke, had an education shaped by various international influences - the Argentine pianist Aldo Antognazzi taught him in Siegen. In Cologne and Vienna he studies with the Russian pianists Pavel Gililov and Rudolf Kehrer. That time he won a number of international prizes: 1st prize at Brahms-Competition Hamburg, 1st prize at Austro Mechana in Vienna and 2nd prize and recital prize at UNISA Transnet competition in Pretoria. Andreas Woyke currently works as a freelance concert pianist living in Graz and teaches piano and chamber music at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (university for music and the performing arts) there. Between 2001 and 2010 he had been a regular guest teacher at the “Musik zentral” music festival in the Steiermark region of Austria, where, as well as giving conventional master classes, he managed an improvisation course specializing in jazz improvisation. 

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REVIEWS:

Virtuosity is the main characteristic of this Villa-Lobos and Ginastera program, played with a peerless verve by Andreas Woyke.

© 2018 Pizzicato

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If Andreas Woyke does well in the wild and naive Ciclo brasileiro by the Brazilian Villa-Lobos, he shows his limits in the terrifying Rudepoêma (dedicated to Rubinstein, who never recorded it), a deluge of notes quite hollow under his fingers. Nelson Freire knew how to convince us otherwise! Very nice sound recording

© 2019 Diapason