Francesco Piemontesi

Born in 1983 in Locarno (Ticino), Francesco Piemontesi began playing piano at the age of four. After initial studies with Nora Doallo, he transferred to Arie Vardi at the Hanover University of Music and Drama. He has also been significantly influenced by his collaborations with Alfred Brendel, Cécile Ousset, Murray Perahia, Mitsuko Uchida, and Alexis Weissenberg. Piemontesi started his international career in 2007 as a prizewinner at the Concours Reine Elisabeth. Since then, he has performed with many of the finest orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Chicago, Boston, and London Symphony Orchestras; the Orchestre de Paris; the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; and the Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia. In the 2023-24 season, he performed with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, among others. Piemontesi is particularly renowned for his interpretations of the classical-romantic repertoire, especially works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Brahms. However, he also devotes himself to Baroque keyboard music and contemporary scores, such as works by Olivier Messiaen and Unsuk Chin. As a chamber musician, he partners with the violinists Renaud Capuçon, Augustin Hadelich, Janine Jansen, and Leonidas Kavakos; the violist Tabea Zimmermann; the cellist Daniel Müller-Schott; the clarinetist Jörg Widmann; and the pianist Martha Argerich. He is closely associated with London’s Wigmore Hall, where he has performed cycles of the complete piano works of Mozart and Schubert and will perform all 32 Beethoven sonatas starting in 2025. Francesco Piemontesi has been Artistic Director of the Settimane musicali in Ascona since 2013. He has released nearly a dozen highly acclaimed CDs. His most recent recording is of Liszt’s Études d’exécution transcendante and the B minor Sonata and was published in the fall of 2023.

One previous Lucerne Festival appearance: on 23 November 2011, when Francesco Piemontesi was introduced as part of the Debut series and performed a program of Debussy, Chopin, Schubert, Mozart, and Lachenmann.

March 2024