Based on a breathtaking, classically trained piano technique, Lhotzky has been recognised for three decades as the most important German ambassador of classical jazz piano and as a bridge builder between its past and present. With countless performances and recordings as a soloist and in duos, as a concert and festival organiser and as the impulse-setting pianist of the band ‘Echoes of Swing’, he invited audiences to rediscover jazz from the 1920s to the 1950s. Although still deeply rooted in both early jazz history and classical music, Bernd Lhotzky has opened up more and more in the course of his musical development. His current projects could hardly be more different: Rag Bag is a modern collage centred around the theme of ragtime. The Shakespeare sonnets that Lhotzky has set to music for Birgit Minichmayr combine folk music, art song, pop music, jazz and chanson. In his acoustic illustration of Otfried Preußler's Krabat, the mill wheel is driven by several interwoven 12-tone rows.