Improvisation plays an important role in Laurens Patzlaff’s artistic and academic work. During the C. Bechstein concert, he plays works by Schumann and Debussy and improvises on themes suggested by the public. Laurens Patzlaff was born in 1981 and started to play the piano at the age of eight. He studied at Stuttgart’s State University of Music to become a school music teacher, specialising in jazz and pop music. In parallel, he took lessons from Friedemann Rieger (Stuttgart) and Uta Weyand (Madrid). He has performed on stage with various bands, played chamber music with the violin player Michael Ewers and given concerts together with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester. Moreover, he regularly plays with the Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester conducted by Sebastian Tewinkel. A number of his performances have been broadcast on the radio.His debut CD, recorded in 2012 and entitled Reflections on Debussy, attracted the attention of the public for its mixture of improvisations and works by the French maestro.
Patzlaff has been teaching improvisation at Stuttgart’s State University of Music since 2007. Previously, he also taught at Freiburg’s and Trossingen’s Universities of Music. In 2013, he was appointed to the chair of Applied Piano at Lübeck’s University of Music (the first chair of its kind ever created in Germany).
Photo: © EMC+ Photography
