For many years, among international concert pianists Markus Becker has convinced his audiences and critics alike as a highly formative interpreter of piano literature from Bach to Rihm, a program director rich in ideas and an established artist whose second home is jazz. Markus Becker was born in 1963 into a musical family. As a three-year-old he was already attracted to keyboard instruments. He received his first piano lessons from Marton Keönch and, later, Heidi Köhler. Singing in the Hanover boys' choir, his first experience in forming a chamber music ensemble, playing in jazz and rock bands and composing stage music expanded his artistic horizon during his school years. After his first awards in various young people's competitions, in 1982, Markus Becker started his piano studies under Karl-Heinz Kämmerling in Hanover alongside master courses with Lew Vlasenko, Leon Fleisher and Fanny Waterman and supplemented by intensive study of chamber music. He received additional crucial guidance over many years from Alfred Brendel. He won various national and international awards, including the first prize at the International Brahms Competition in Hamburg in 1987. Today, Markus Becker's concert performances of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Gershwin set standards, and he has also created a fresh impression of composers such as Pfitzner, Hindemith, Draeseke, Widor and the two concerts for left hand by Franz Schmidt. In his solo programs Markus Becker contrasts these rediscoveries with piano literature's major standard works. Being a virtuoso jazz improviser, he is also an exception among classical pianists. At regular intervals Becker performs at the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Schlesweig-Holstein Music Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, Kissinger Sommer, the Beethoven Festival in Bonn and the Ludwigsburg Castle Festival. Markus Becker has played with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, RSB Berlin, the radio symphony orchestras of the NDR, WDR and SWR in Germany, and the BBC Welsh Orchestra under such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Howard Griffiths, Michael Sanderling, Steven Sloane, and Marcus Bosch. Becker's main interest is chamber music. As an interpreter, professor and festival manager he devotes a great deal of attention to this specific field. The focus of his artistic attention is the area where musical individuality and the collaborative search for interpretative solutions intersect. Among his partners are Albrecht Mayer, Nils Mönkemeyer, Adrian Brendel, Igor Levit, Sharon Kam, Alban Gerhardt, and Tabea Zimmermann. Chamber music is also of central importance to Markus Becker's teaching: Since 1993, he has been a professor at the Hanover Academy for Music, Theater and Media. He supervises a class of pianists and chamber ensembles which have gained widespread attention with their repeated award-winning performances. He is director of the Institute for Chamber Music and of his academy's annual Chamber Music Festival. With his CD recordings Becker is the three-time winner of the &ECHO-Klassik& award as well as the German Critics Choice Award and the &Editor´s Choice& award in the British trade journal GRAMOPHONE. His recordings for EMI, Decca, cpo and Thorofon include works by Brahms, Schumann, Bach, Beethoven, Dussek and George Antheil. Today, Markus Becker produces most of his recordings under the British label hyperion. Within a brief span of time, these have included the cello sonatas by Max Reger (with Alban Gerhardt), piano concerts by Draeseke, Jadassohn and Widor, chamber music by Erwin Schulhoff and, most recently, Reger's arrangements of Bach's organ works. Becker's recording of Max Rege's complete piano works on 12 CDs (Thorofon) is already considered legendary. FonoForum's assessment of this major encyclopedic achievement: &One of those rare and truly major achievements of piano artistry in the past 50 years.&