Gerhard Oppitz is a pianist in the tradition of the ‘German’ piano titans of the 20th century — the likes of Wilhelm Kempff, Claudio Arrau and Wilhelm Backhaus. His international career began in 1977 when he won the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, where the ninety-year-old Rubinstein himself sat on the jury. He recorded his first album in 1978; now, his discography comprises 89 CDs. CD and video recordings also document fruitful collaborations with legendary conductors such as Giulini, Jochum, Sawallisch, Wand, Kondrashin, von Dohnányi, Maazel, Prêtre, Dutoit, Kitaenko, Blomstedt, Janowski, Mehta, I. Fischer and Muti. From 1981 to 2012, he held a professorship at the Munich University of Music. Gerhard Oppitz has a particular fondness for performing complete cycles of music in his concerts – Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, the sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart, and above all the complete piano works of Brahms, which he has performed more than thirty times in Europe, North America and Japan. In 2009, he received the Brahms Prize from the Brahms Society of Schleswig-Holstein, an honour previously bestowed upon Leonard Bernstein and Yehudi Menuhin. In 2014, he was bestowed the Maximilian of Bavaria Medal for Science and the Arts, the highest honour of the Free State of Bavaria, with which Johannes Brahms was honoured in 1873. In 2021, Gerhard Oppitz stepped in at short notice to chair the jury of the 15th Concours Géza Anda in place of Nelson Freire.