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| Willi Huber |
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Biography
Huber has been making music since he was a child. At the age of five he started taking piano lessons. His father started teaching him how to play the Zither when he was thirteen. Within four years he took first place performing on the Zither in a Jungend musiziert competition. At the University of Munich Huber majored in piano, also minoring in jazz harmony and arrangement.
By 1990 Huber was performing his own compositions – in light and popular music styles -- that he penned as Willi März. In 1992 he again walked away with first place as a Zither virtuoso, this time in the ZDF Auftakt musical competition for young people.
As a professional musician Huber composed and arranged numerous instrumental works used in television and radio. Since 1999 he has been collaborating with the SWR Rundfunkblasorchester (SWR Radio's wind orchestra), producing works for Zither and wind orchestra. In 2000 Huber took on further responsibilities with the SWR Rundfunkorchester as composer/arranger/conductor. Simultaneously he has been working as a composer/arranger for Symphonic Saxophones, a sax quartet with rhythm section.
In the last several years, Huber has been actively exposing audiences internationally to the music of the instrument. Huber performed before Hu Tschin Tao, the former Vice President of China, on the occasion of a state visit to Bavaria in 2001. Touring Japan in 2003, Huber performed in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagaoka, and Ito, wrapping the trip up by holding a seminar for Japanese Zither players. The following year found him once again in Japan, performing as guest artist at the International Harp Festival in Soka, Japan. For EXPO 2005 in Aichi, Japan, Huber was invited to be a guest artist representing an important aspect of German culture. After that he gave concerts in Tokyo and Sapporo as well as a Christmas Concert at the Goethe Institute in Taipei.
In between his trips to Asia, Huber also performed closer to home in Germany. In 2002 he debuted the official opening fanfare Entrada bavarica at the New Year's reception of the Bavarian Minister-President, Dr. Edmund Stoiber, in the Muenchner Residenz. He performed his own compositions for Zither and orchestra at a 2003 concert of the Heilbronn Symphony Orchestra.
