PETER BREINER
BIOGRAPHY
Peter Breiner (1957) is known as a composer, conductor, pianist and arranger. He began to study piano in his early childhood (1961) and his exceptional results led to his early acceptance at the Conservatory in Kosice (1971). He studied piano (L. Kojanova), composition (J. Podprocky), conducting and percussion. In 1975-1981 he studied composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (former Czechoslovakia) with Prof. Alexander Moyzes, one of the most significant figures in modern Slovak music. Peter Breiner lived in Toronto, Canada between 1992 and 2007. In 2007 he became a US resident and moved to New York. He loves it.
One of the world's most recorded musicians, with over 150 CDs recorded and over 1.5 million CDs sold, Breiner has conducted, often doubling as a pianist, numerous major orchestras all around the world.
Breiner’s own compositions, played in concerts and brodcasted worldwide, have always been “multidimensional”. During his studies, he was fascinated by crossing over different musical worlds. Later, he preferred a synthesis of both polarized types of music which brings his music closer to the world of Leonard Bernstein.
Breiner’s clever arrangements are perhaps the best known. Breiner’s arrangements of national anthems of ALL participating countries were used during the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 and in Beijing in 2008. The later was without any license or permission.
Beatles Go Baroque (over quarter million CDs sold worldwide) and Elvis Goes Baroque is a collection of Breiner’s commercially most successful Baroque arrangements together with Christmas Goes Baroque I and II.
His work has been also included in Canadian film classics such as Kevin Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables, the CBC television show Wind at My Back and Timothy Findley's Piano Man's Daughter, produced by Whoopi Goldberg.
He is proficient in seven languages. He has hosted various TV and radio programs about music. In 1993, he was a co-host and music director of the most popular TV talk show in Slovakia, attracting over 2 million viewers in a country with a population of 5,5 million. Also active as a journalist, Peter had his own column in some of Slovakia's most influential daily and weekly papers for almost 10 years. His book "Maple Leaves" came out in April 1998 and became a No.1 non-fiction national best-seller immediately. In January 2000 he started to host his own (politically incorrect) TV show that was banned twice in three months, the second time for good.
It is difficult to assign a title to this artist, is he the conductor who composes or is he the pianist who arranges. As he simply states, "I am a musician". In this age of high specialization, it is not so easy to find someone who with the same ease conducts a symphonic orchestra in Barber's Symphony, a big-band at a swing concert, a chamber orchestra with baroque programme while playing harpsichord or a group of almost 200 musicians recording a score for Universal Studios' movie. It is also not so easy to find a pianist who would play recital of Mozart and Bach one evening, jazz recital the other, followed by a night of tangos. His recitals are unique , the audience requests formulate the programme, a retro spin for modern audiences. (Some of the latest concert appearances: London, Berlin, Istanbul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Washington).
Films that include Breiner's musical scores have enjoyed very wide international exposure. His music has been featured many times on the most popular US TV shows.
