Biography

French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie studied in Montreal with Yvonne Hubert, in Vienna with Beethoven specialist Dieter Weber, in addition to working with Leon Fleischer. In 1984, he won First Prize in the Busoni Competition and was also prizewinner at the Leeds Competition. This season, Mr. Lortie returns to Australia and New Zealand performing with the New Zealand Symphony on tour, and with the Sydney and Adelaide symphonies. He also returns to Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo performing with the orchestra and in recital, and he embarks on a recital tour of Russia. He returns to the Philadelphia Orchestra with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and tours with the Toronto Symphony and Andrew Davis. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 1986.

Mr. Lortie’s upcoming concerts include returns to the NDR Hamburg Symphony, BBC Symphony, and to the orchestras of Atlanta, Milwaukee, Dallas, and Vancouver. His performances of Liszt’s complete Années de pèlerinage will be heard at Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, and to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday year in 2020, he performs the complete Beethoven sonatas and concertos in North America and in Europe.

Mr. Lortie has made more than forty-five recordings for the Chandos label, covering repertory from Mozart to Stravinsky, including a set of the complete Beethoven sonatas, the complete Années de pèlerinage, which was named one of the ten best recordings of 2012 by The New Yorker and all of Chopin’s solo works. His recording of the Lutosławski Piano Concerto with Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony received high praise, as did a recent Chopin recording which was named one of the best recordings of the year by The New York Times. Recent released albums include Chopin’s waltzes; Saint-Saëns’s Africa, Wedding Cake, and Carnival of the Animals with Neeme Järvi and the Bergen Philharmonic; and, with Hélène Mercier, Rachmaninoff’s complete works for two pianos and the Vaughan Williams Concerto for Two Pianos. For the Onyx label, he has recorded two albums with violinist Augustin Dumay.

Mr. Lortie is the Master-in-Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel of Brussels. His LacMus International Festival on Lake Como, Italy, made its debut in 2017. He has lived mostly in Europe in the last decades with homes in Berlin, Canada, and Italy.

(April 2019)