Peter Wolf is a multi-grammy nominated, world-renowned composer, producer, songwriter and arranger, and was recently knighted and awarded with the highest honor his birth country of Austria has to give, das Groesse Ehrenkreuz der Republik Oesterreich fuer Kunst und Kultur. Born in Vienna, Wolf studied classical piano at the Vienna’s Conservatory of Music and won the European Jazz Festival as a solo pianist at age 16. He was awarded twice with the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis for his work on Andre Heller and Erika Pluhar . He came to America in his early 20’s and began playing keyboards for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in the late 70’s. He was one of America’s top ranking studio keyboardists and arrangers from 1980 to 1985 and became a hugely successful music producer and songwriter.
He has written eight #1 songs and produced, arranged and/or written for a wide range of musical talents including THE JEFFERSON STARSHIP (“We Built This City”, “Sara”) COMMODORES (“Nightshift”), WANG CHUNG (“Everybody Have Fun Tonight”, “Let’s Go”) EL DEBARGE (“Who’s Johnny” from “Short Circuit”) GO WEST (“King of Wishful Thinking” from “Pretty Woman”, “Faithful”) HEART (“These Dreams”, “What About Love”) PATTI LABELLE (“On My Own”) KENNY LOGGINS (“Playing With The Boys” from “Top Gun”, “Avalon”) ESCAPE CLUB (“I’ll Be There”) PABLO CRUISE, GRACE SLICK, SANTANA, THE POINTER SISTERS, CHICAGO, CLIFF RICHARD, NATALIE COLE, THE SCORPIONS, N’SYNC, OLETA ADAMS, SERGIO MENDES and JOE SAMPLE.
In addition to his career in the world of rock and popular music Wolf has also scored a number of major motion pictures including the 1993 hit “Neverending Story III”, and “Weekend at Bernie’s II”. Wolf has also composed many scores in Europe including the new animated picture for the recently Oscar-awarded “Best Foreign Film” producer, Sven Ebeling, entitled “Nutcracker and Mouse King” featuring a star-studded cast. For that score he was nominated for the Deutscher Filmpreis. He scored Leon DeWinter’s movie “The Hollywood Sign”, starring Rod Steiger, Burt Reynolds and Tom Beringer. His impressive compositional credits also include the score for the number one German picture in 1997 “Irren Ist Maennlich”, as well as films such as “Die Cellistin”, “Widows”, “St. Pauli Nacht” and “The Fearless Four”. He is now composing songs and score for the new American picture “Band On the Run” to be released in 2007. Just in June this year, he received the “Billy Wilder Award” of the Austrian Film Academy and University of Vienna.
Peter just finished a shortfilm for the Sundance Filmfestival called “A through M”.
For next year he already has agreed to do three filmscores for various American
and European films.
His TV credits include the enormously popular and second largest TV show in the history of international television, “Kommissar Rex” sold into 107 countries including Asia, Australia, Europe, South America and Canada for the fourth season. He has also composed music for RTL, Pro 7 and SAT 1 productions such as TV movies, “Koerner & Koeter”, “Das Allerbeste Stueck”, “Dance on the Volcano”. He composed the music and produced the entertainment blocks of the World Sports Awards at the Royal Albert Hall in Londontwo years in a row. In 2006 he will take
over scoring the highly successful series SOKO-Donau for ZDF and ORF .
Wolf composed and performed an 86 minute original millennium symphony he was commissioned to create for the 20th Annual SoundCloud Festival, one of the world’s renowned and acclaimed open air music festivals, that took place on September 4th 1999 in Linz, Austria on the Danube River in front of an audience 123,000 people. Wolf’s PROGRESSION Symphony includes performances by Klaus Maria Brandauer, Coolio, James Ingram, Cliff Richard, Jennifer Paige, Vincenzo LaScola, Steve Lukather of Toto, Julian Rachlin, and Peter’s wife, singer and lyricist Michelle Wolf. Due to its enormous success, he composed and performed a second original symphonic piece for 2004 entitled “SENSE-ATION”, in front of 110,000 people. He has recently signed a new deal with Universal Records International-UK as a jazz and classical artist, where both symphonic CDs are available.His first tour through
Europe in September 2005 was a big hit with European Jazzcritics. A swiss journalist wrote , that Peters Band “..was better than anything I heard in Montreax this year.”
He is also writing a musical with his writing partner, lyricist, Michelle Wolf, and world-renowned author Leon DeWinter. The musical will premiere in the historical Ronacher in Vienna, Austriain fall of 2007, and then move on to Tokyo and Berlin.
Presently Peter is working on prerecords for two new American produced motion pictures where music is the focal point of the plot.
With 75 million records sold , Peter was voted second most successful musician of the last century by a premiere Austrian magazine, trailing only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart .
Peter and his wife, Michelle, maintain homes in both the Los Angeles area and in his native Austria and travel easily between the worlds of both American and European culture and music.
