Read about the Artistic Director of the Klavier am Rhein Festival:

Yossi Reshef is an Israeli-born concert pianist, teacher and conductor based in Berlin. Solo concerts, chamber music and orchestral tours have taken him throughout Europe, Asia, the United States and Africa during his career as a pianist. His recordings and performances, including at Carnegie Hall in NY, have received numerous critical accolades.

Yossi Reshef is the founder and artistic director of the annual Pisa Piano Masterclass, the “Klavier am Rhein” festival (for piano and chamber music) in Rheinau and the Berlin Piano Festival, at which renowned artists from all over the world perform and give concerts every year in Berlin’s most prestigious concert halls, such as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts. One of the partners of the Berlin Piano Festival is the World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC). Reshef is an active faculty member of the Musicfest Perugia, the Yablonsky Music Institute and the Tel-Hai International Piano Masterclasses Festival. Numerous masterclasses have taken Yossi Reshef to prestigious institutions such as the Gnessin Conservatory in Moscow, the Lodz Academy in Poland, the Berlin University of the Arts, the Cape Town Music University and many other leading music institutions worldwide. A recent part of Reshef’s work is the examination of artificial intelligence in music, to which a special theme day will be dedicated in the 2026 edition of the Berliner Klavierfesttage.

Born in Israel, Yossi Reshef studied with the legendary Pnina Salzman (pupil of Alfred Cortot and Arthur Rubinstein) at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv, after which he completed his doctorate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. During this time, he was appointed personal teaching assistant to his professor Norman Krieger. During his doctorate, Reshef became professor of chamber music at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music and, after completing his doctorate, was appointed visiting professor of piano at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. In 2010, Yossi Reshef opened his own studio in Berlin, where he has worked with numerous young pianists in recent years and prepared them for international competitions.

Reshef attaches great importance to attaching the utmost importance to every detail of the score in order to develop a profound understanding of the structure, the technical subtleties, the multi-faceted sound world and the characteristic expression of a work. In recent years, he has devoted himself intensively to the compositions of Schumann, Dvorak, Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven, as well as modern music. He is firmly convinced that a comprehensive understanding of many of a composer’s works is the key to interpreting their music. In his own publications and articles, such as “Teaching piano and how we perceive the instrument”, Reshef provides insights into his views and approach to music and pedagogy. His other publications include CDs dedicated to new performances of modern piano literature, as well as recordings of Franz Liszt’s Paganini Etudes, Dvorak’s Poetic Tone Pictures, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann.

Yossi Reshef is the recipient of numerous international awards and scholarships, such as the America Israel Cultural Foundation Excellency Prize, the Zilbermann Prize for the best interpretation of Israeli piano music, the second prize of the Rubin Academy Competition, the Apple Hill: Piano For Peace Prize, the John Green Endowed Scholarship, the Ann and Gordon Getty Endowed Scholarship and others.

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