Christian A. Pohl completed his piano studies at the Freiburg University of Music with Felix Gottlieb, a pupil of Alexander Goldenweiser and Emil Gilels. During his youth, he was taught by Markus Stange, a pupil of Jürgen Uhde, and attended masterclasses with Vitaly Margulis and Seymour Bernstein. He has performed both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. His chamber music partners have included Felix Gottlieb, Christoph Henkel and Daishin Kashimoto, as well as members of the Staatskapelle Dresden. Christian A. Pohl taught at the conservatories in Freiburg and Stuttgart before being appointed Professor of Piano and Piano Methodology at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig in 2009 at the age of 34. His publications on piano methodology have been published by Schott/Mainz, Breitkopf & Härtel/Wiesbaden and HudsonRiverPress/New York. As a juror, he regularly takes part in national and international music competitions, including the Dvorak, Kronberg, Schumann and Bach competitions.  He has been Director of the International Mendelssohn Academy Leipzig since 2012 and President of IKAM, the International Piano Academy Murrhardt, since 2021. Concerts, masterclasses and seminars have taken him to numerous German cities as well as Austria, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Israel, Egypt, China, Japan and Switzerland.

In recent years, he has accepted invitations to perform in Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Hanover, Hamburg, Jena, Dresden, Zwickau, Chemnitz, Bern, Vienna, Innsbruck, Madrid, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, among others, at renowned institutions such as the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the Mozarteum Salzburg, the Jerusalem Music Academy and the Central Conservatory Beijing. His students regularly win prizes at national and international piano competitions, most recently at the international piano competitions in Epinal (silver medal), Thalberg (gold medal) and Istanbul (gold medal). He is a representative for the instrumentarium, was a member of the admissions committee and the senate and, as dean of studies, headed the piano/conducting department at the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre for six years. He was nominated for the Saxon Teaching Prize in 2014 and has been an author at Edition Peters publishing house since 2017. In spring 2022, after 20 years of development, his 400-page book “Klaviermethodik” (Edition Peters) was published. Since January 2023, the “Digital Piano Methodology” has been available on the Internet, a globally unique advanced training programme in the field of piano methodology developed by Christian A. Pohl.

www.christian-pohl.com
Credit: Jörg Singer