Cameron Carpenter

The American organist Cameron Carpenter, who was born in 1981 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, joined the American Boychoir School in Princeton at the age of 11, later attending the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he studied composition and organ with John E. Mitchener. During this time, he transcribed more than 100 works for organ, including Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. From 2000 to 2006, Carpenter completed his education at the Juilliard School in New York, where Gerre Hancock, John Weaver, and Paul Jacobs were among his teachers. He also wrote his first original compositions during these years. Carpenter performs throughout Europe, the United States, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He commissioned a special instrument for his concerts: the International Touring Organ, which allows him to perform in any conceivable location without having to confine himself to churches or concert halls equipped with organs. Since 2014, he has played almost exclusively on this digital instrument. Cameron Carpenter has performed with the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Orquesta Nacional de España, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. He was artist-in-residence at the Konzerthaus Berlin last season. In the 2018-19 season, he will give recitals at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Cologne and Luxembourg Philharmonie, as well as in Estonia and Russia; together with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach, he will present his own arrangement of Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations. Carpenter’s debut CD, Revolutionary, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2008; If You Could Read My Mind received an Echo Klassik Award in 2015. His most recent album, All You Need Is Bach, was released in June 2016.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 21 November 2016 in a program of works by Bach, Messiaen, Schumann, Liszt, and Scriabin.

October 2018