It wasn’t long ago, when a flurry of young violin virtuosos like Hilary Hahn, Lisa Batiashvili, Julia Fischer, and Baiba Skride emerged on the scene, that we used to hear mention of a “Wonder Girl” in the violin world. Nowadays, though, women are leading the way in the piano as well as the violin scene. With Yuja Wang, Lise de la Salle, and Khatia Buniatishvili a new generation of women pianists is following in the footsteps of Martha Argerich, Hélène Grimaud, & Co. All three of these young talents will appear as guest artists in November at LUCERNE FESTIVAL at the Piano. And so in this edition of our newsletter as well as the next, we’ll introduce them to you.

Kicking off our series is the youngest of the bunch, Lise de la Salle, who was born in 1988 in Cherbourg, France. She comes from a family of painters and musicians. Her grandfather and great-grandfather operated art galleries (the latter exhibited the work of such painters as Modigliani and Soutine); her mother sang in a choir, while her grandmother taught piano and herself had a grandmother who had been a Russian concert pianist and who had once met Tchaikovsky. So it seems only natural that de la Salle began playing piano at the age of four, making tremendously rapid strides. When she was only nine she played a concert that was broadcast live by Radio France; four years later she scored a sensational success playing Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, filling in at the last minute and learning the piece with very little notice; meanwhile, at sixteen she triumphed at the prestigious Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York. All the while, as her career was speedily taking off, she completed piano studies at the Paris Conservatory, which had accepted her at the age of eleven. When de la Salle underwent the process of acquiring her diploma, she recorded her third CD just a few days before the final exams. It’s therefore no surprise that this “extreme talent”—as the critic Joachim Kaiser has described her—already made her Lucerne debut in 2008, at the age of twenty.

Still, impressive as these early achievements are, the important point is not that de la Salle has enjoyed rapid success but that she has been pursuing a sustainable course of development. “I need time to reflect in order to allow things to mature,” she explains. “Music in general requires time. I’m not an orange whose juice can be squeezed out before it’s tossed aside.” Indeed, the former prodigy has grown into a reflective artist who not only commands a light, flexible touch, a lucid and lyrical approach to phrasing, and an astonishing technique but also has very clear ideas about the works she performs. Hear this artistry for yourself when she performs a recital in Lucerne on 26 November devoted to Franz Liszt, including the highly virtuosic “Dante” Sonata and the Ballade in B minor, as well as Liszt’s imaginative arrangements of masterpieces by his fellow composers, such as the poignant “Lacrimosa” from the Mozart Requiem.