Swiss pianist
Benjamin Engeli is an unusually versatile musician, with output ranging from
Beethoven to contemporary music to a unique experiment with the music of
Gershwin.
Engeli is also noted as a piano educator. He was born in 1978 in the small Swiss city of Kreuzlingen and grew up in a musical family. He experimented with various instruments, however, and did not begin piano lessons until he was 15, working with
Adrian Oetiker. He made rapid progress, and later studied with
András Schiff,
Maurizio Pollini, and
Lazar Berman. Even at the Musikakademie Basel he pursued a dual study track, in piano and French horn, but after moving on for graduate study at the Zurich University of the Arts (with
Homero Francesch), he devoted himself to the piano exclusively. Graduating in 2003, he formed the
Tecchler Trio, which won the 2007 ARD Music Competition. That year,
Engeli joined the Gershwin Piano Quartet: not an ensemble of piano and strings but a group of four pianos playing arrangements of
Gershwin's music.
Engeli made some of those arrangements himself, including on the group's 2010 CD. The group was an international success, mounting tours in China, Brazil, and the Middle East; he has also appeared as a soloist or teacher in North and South America, Australia, and India. In 2010
Engeli also launched
his own solo recording career with a group of
Beethoven piano sonatas on the Solo Musica label. He has also recorded for NEOS, Claves, Challenge Classics, and Ars Produktion, returning to Solo Musica to accompany
Astrid and
Sonja Leutwyler on Hymne à la Beauté in 2018. In 2013 he was part of a chamber group that premiered new works by
Tobias PM Schneid.
Engeli taught piano for eight years at the Musikhochschule Basel, and then moved to a piano professorship at the Landeskonservatorium Feldkirch in Austria.