Kristian Bezuidenhout

Born in South Africa in 1979, Kristian Bezuidenhout was educated in Australia and later at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His teachers included Rebecca Penneys, Arthur Haas, Malcolm Bilson, and Paul O’Dette. At the age of 21, Bezuidenhout won the prestigious fortepiano competition in Bruges and launched his international career. He not only plays on historical keyboard instruments such as the fortepiano and harpsichord but also performs on the modern grand piano, as in the concert, on 24 August 2022, where he can be heard on a fortepiano by Conrad Graf, a Blüthner grand piano, and a Steinway grand piano. A major focus of his repertoire is the music of the Baroque and Classical periods. As a soloist, Bezuidenhout has performed piano concertos with the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Les Siècles. Recently, he has often taken up conducting as well, such as with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, which appointed him to its helm in 2017, and The English Concert, which named him Principal Guest Conductor. Other engagements in this dual role have taken him to the Camerata Salzburg, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, and Kammerakademie Potsdam. Bezuidenhout devotes himself intensively to chamber music, working with the violinists Isabelle Faust, Alina Ibragimova, and Rachel Podger; the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras; and the singers Carolyn Sampson, Mark Padmore, and Matthias Goerne. Together with Anne Sofie von Otter, he presented a staged production of Schubert’s Winterreise in Basel in 2022. Among his CDs should be highlighted his complete cycle of Mozart’s piano sonatas, which earned him the Diapason d’or, the Prize of the German Record Critics, and the Prix Caecilia.

Lucerne Festival debut on 27 November 2009 with piano works by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart.

July 2022