Seong-Jin Cho

Born in Seoul in 1994, Seong-Jin Cho began playing the piano at the age of six and gave his first public concert when he was eleven. In 2009, he won the Hamamatsu International Competition in Japan; two years later, he received third prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and in 2015 he won the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Since then, Seong-Jin Cho, who studied with Michel Béroff at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris and now lives in Berlin, has been a regular guest artist with the world’s leading orchestras. In the 2024-25 season, he was artist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker and performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst. He additionally undertook a tour of South Korea with the Vienna Philharmonic and Andris Nelsons and toured three Asian countries with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle. Seong-Jin Cho also gave recitals at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Vienna Musikverein, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Sala Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. To mark the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, he performed that composer’s complete works for solo piano at the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Barbican Centre in London, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Berlin’s Philharmonie, Symphony Hall in Boston, Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. He also released a recording of this music in January 2025, and his account of the two Ravel concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons followed shortly thereafter. Seong-Jin Cho has been an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2016 and has recorded works by Chopin, Mozart, Liszt, and Schubert for the DG label as well.

One previous Lucerne Festival performance: on 30 August 2024, when Seong-Jin Cho performed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Myung-Whun Chung.

March 2025