Peter Breiner

Peter Breiner is a Slovak conductor, pianist, composer, successful arranger, and publicist, who has been living abroad for many years. He is among the most recorded musicians in the world. His commercially most successful projects include his baroque renditions of pop hits – the suites Beatles Go Baroque, Elvis Goes Baroque, and Christmas Goes Baroque I & II.

He has conducted, often playing the piano himself, numerous renowned orchestras (e.g., the Royal Philharmonic in London, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and many others in Slovakia, Europe, Asia, and North America).

Breiner's compositions and arrangements are performed daily around the world (concerts, radio stations). Some of his most notable released albums include his orchestral arrangements of Mussorgsky's works (Pictures at an Exhibition, Songs and Dances of Death, The Children's Room) and Tchaikovsky's operatic suites (The Duke, The Queen of Spades). His arrangements of Janáček's operas gained worldwide acclaim and excellent reviews. Breiner's arrangements of national anthems were performed at the Summer Olympic Games in Athens (2004) and illegally at the Beijing Olympics (2008).

He is the composer of music for several films from Slovak, Canadian, and American productions (Anna of Green Gables, The Pianist's Daughter, The Magic Flute). His music is often used as a foundation for choreography by leading ballet companies (American Ballet Theatre, Houston Ballet, Royal Ballet (UK), and others) and has appeared in popular American TV shows.

As a composer, he has written dozens of solo, chamber, and orchestral works and is also the author of three musicals. One of Breiner’s most significant projects is his suite for large symphonic orchestra Slovak Dances, Nasty and Nice (Slovenské tance, pochabé i smutné), consisting of 16 dances based on Slovak folk songs. In addition to the orchestral version, this project has been presented in various formats – for solo piano, string duo and trio, jazz trio, and folk instruments. Slovak Dances were also presented at the legendary Carnegie Hall in New York in 2016 and as a full-length ballet at the Slovak National Theatre during the 2015-2019 seasons.

In 2020, Breiner began recording and releasing a new series of recordings titled Calm Romantic Piano. The series has already reached millions of streams – on the Spotify platform alone, Breiner has one million listeners and 2.5 million streams per month, and his Dvořák album went viral with over 29 million streams. In 2024, Breiner began recording a similar series of solo piano arrangements for the prestigious British label Orchid Classics. The second volume of this series, titled Three Colours, includes 32 original piano preludes.

In 2021, Breiner was invited by the Dutch streaming company OnAir to become their music director and conductor. This collaboration led to films of three of Stravinsky's most important ballets, recorded under Breiner's baton with the Royal Philharmonic in the BBC studio.

Peter Breiner has been active as a publicist and commentator for decades in the largest Slovak newspapers, and two collections of his essays have been published as books.

“Breiner's years of study of composition at the Conservatory in Košice and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava were devoted to acquiring the basics of traditional composition craft (Symphony for Orchestra), an activity soon compensated by his own extra-curricular compositional work (Variations on a Theme by Alban Berg; Protivety / Counter Statements for Large Orchestra) which followed the ideas of the modern avant-garde. The diversity of Breiner's musical activities, however, soon caused a fascination with the idea of mutual penetration and crossing between different worlds of music, apparent in his Concertino for Viola and Strings (1976-77), which became the central creative principle of his work after studies and is associated with contemporary compositional efforts in multiple styles. Breiner's nonconformist nature caused using these crossings mainly as surprises and deductions, which could acquire the character of musical humor, while he was fascinated above all by “crossing” through “serious” and “nonserious” music culture. So Breiner's early compositional effort is representative of neoclassical confrontation (Concertino; Fractures; Hovoriace hodiny / Talking Clock; Niečo ako koncert pre klavír a orchester / Something Like a Concert for Piano and Orchestra; Suitička / The Little Suite), and as of late he has attempted to synthesize means of both polarized music (Ďalší koncert pre klavír a orchester / Another Concert for Piano and Orchestra; ...aby som ti posvietil na cestu / ...so I Can Light Your Way; Sonata Ostinata; Concerto for Orchestra and Orchestra), which brings his work to the world of L. Bernstein. So if the poetry of the 1980s generation stood in the sign of diversification (rock inspiration in compositions by M. Burlas, synthesis with historical music at work by V. Godár), Breiner's effort complemented it by a current dimension of jazz inspiration that allowed him to remain in the “nonserious” sphere of his beloved music humor and to build his own audience, but which also gave to his work attributes of “nonoriginality” or “eclecticism,” which leveled undesired hypertrophy of his musical talent and individuality. Breiners' efforts at the same time were directed to the area of popular music, where he became the author of dozens songs, hundreds of arrangements, and to the area of musicals (Čarovná čaša / Magic Bowl; Brzdy / Brakes;, Ukradnutý biely slon / Stolen White Elephant) and jazz compositions. The idea of hybridization was also behind Breiners' most commercially successful products – adaptations of songs of The Beatles and songs of E. Presley in the spirit of the Baroque concerto style (CD Beatles Seasons, 1985, Beatles Go Baroque, 1993, Elvis Goes Baroque, 1994). The “unserious” classification of Breiner's composition paradoxically also meant that his “serious” works are now becoming less and less seen in our concert life, as is his monumental passion The Story, which is actually the only original Slovak passion composition, still can't find its way into local dramatic plans.”

(GODÁR, Vladimír: Peter Breiner. In: 100 slovenských skladateľov. Ed. Marián Jurík, Peter Zagar. Bratislava : Národné hudobné centrum, 1998, p. 54 – 55.)