Paul Rivinius

Paul Rivinius is best known as a chamber music player and as a vocal accompanist. He has performed and recorded on both the piano and the French horn. Rivinius was born in Munich, Germany, in 1970. His first instrument was the piano, which he took up at age five. He attended the Musikhochschule Saarbrücken, studying piano with Nerine Barrett, Walter Blankenheim, and Alexander Sellier. After completing his studies there, he moved to the Musikhochschule Frankfurt and studied both piano (with Raymund Havenith) and horn (with Marie-Luise Neunecker). Rivinius rounded off his studies with Gerhard Oppitz at the Musikhochschule München, receiving a degree with distinction in the school's advanced piano course in 1998. By that time, his professional career was already well underway. He played horn for several years with the Bundesjugendorchester Deutschland and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester youth orchestras, in the latter under the baton of Claudio Abbado. In 1996, Rivinius joined the Clemente Trio on piano, and with that group won major prizes, including the ARD Competition in 1998. He toured with the Clemente Trio to New York's Carnegie Hall and Wigmore Hall in London. Rivinius also began performing chamber music with his brother Gustav, a cellist. They added two more brothers and began performing as the Rivinius Piano Quartet. In 2004, Rivinius replaced Tamara-Anna Cislowska in the Mozart Piano Quartet, a chamber group that has toured Europe, North America, and South America. For some years, he juggled these responsibilities with teaching at the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler in Berlin; he later began performing on a freelance basis in Munich. Rivinius has a large catalog of recordings made with various other chamber performers on labels, including BIS, MDG, and CAvi-Music. He has often recorded with cellist Johannes Moser; the pair issued the three-volume survey Brahms and His Contemporaries on the Hänssler Classic label late in the 2000s decade. He has also recorded viola-and-piano music with violist Christian Euler. Additionally, Rivinius is active as a vocal accompanist and in 2020 backed soprano Camilla Tilling on a BIS album of songs associated with the Jugendstil artistic movement. ~ James Manheim