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 at eleven. In 2009 he won the International Hamamatsu Competition in Japan, followed two years later by Third Prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow; in 2015 he won the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Since then, Cho, who studied with Michel Béroff at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris and now lives in Berlin, has become a regular guest with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Berliner Philharmoniker, which named him artist-in-residence for the 2024-25 season. The London Symphony Orchestra featured him in its “Artist Portrait” series in the 2025-26 season, as part of which he appeared several times with the orchestra and gave the world premiere of a piano concerto written for him by Donghoon Shin. Last season, he also performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He toured Asia with the Czech Philharmonic under Semyon Bychkov and the Munich Philharmonic under Lahav Shani, and appeared across several European cities with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under Andris Nelsons. His recital appearances have taken him to venues such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Vienna Musikverein, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Carnegie Hall in New York, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Since 2016, Seong-Jin Cho has been an exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon, for which he has released recordings of works by Chopin, Mozart, Liszt, Schubert, and Handel. In 2025, to mark Maurice Ravel’s 150th anniversary, Cho recorded Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, as well as the composer’s complete works for solo piano, for which he received the Opus Klassik. In 2023, he was awarded the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for the Arts.

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.

May 2026