Behzod Abduraimov

Behzod Abduraimov, who was born in 1990 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, began playing piano at the age of five and was initially trained by Tamara Popovich at the Uspensky State Academy of Music in his native city. In 2007 he transferred to Park University in Kansas City, where he graduated from the International Center for Music with Stanislav Ioudenitch as his mentor. Abduraimov won the London International Piano Competition in 2009 with his performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and, in 2010, the Kissinger Piano Olympics. Since then he has given concerts with many internationally renowned orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Oslo Philharmonic and has worked with such conductors as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Manfred Honeck, Jakub Hrůša, Vladimir Jurowski, and Yuri Temirkanov. Gustavo Dudamel engaged him to perform Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 2018. In the 2018-19 season, Abduraimov appeared with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic; in addition, he made his debut with the Orchestre de Paris and performed works by Mozart and Beethoven with the English Chamber Orchestra, which he himself conducted. Abduraimov also gave recitals in Cologne, Chicago, Baden-Baden, Moscow, Vancouver, and New York. His debut CD of works by Saint-Saëns, Prokofiev, and Liszt, which was released in 2012, garnered the Choc de Classica as well as the Diapason Découverte. His most recent release is of piano concertos by Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI under Juraj Valčuha.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 2 September 2017, when he was the soloist in Prokofiev’s First and Third Piano Concertos with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev.

July 2019