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Horn player Felix Klieser (born 1991) is an exceptional artist in every respect. He began learning to play the horn at the age of five. When he was seventeen he was a juvenile student at the College of Music and Drama in Hanover.
Felix Klieser plays the valves of his horn with the toes of his left foot, having been born without arms. No easy task, one might think, but Felix Klieser sees this deficiency not as a burden but as a challenge. And in his successive phases of development the musician has risen to this challenge with perseverance and imagination. As a five-year-old, he simply sat on the floor to play, with the instrument standing in front of him; as he grew older and bigger, the horn moved to a chair. Finally, the teenager worked with an instrument builder to develop a stand with which, sitting comfortably on a chair, he can generate the necessary pressure when playing.
Felix Klieser won the 2014 ECHO Klassik award as Young Artist of the Year along with the Music Prize of the Association of German Concert Directors (VdKD). That year also saw the publication by Patmos Verlag of his biography Fussnoten ("Footnotes – a hornist without arms conquers the world"). He received the Leonard Bernstein Award in 2015.
Since 2013, Felix Klieser has made three recordings on Berlin Classics.
