Nicolas Namoradze

Nicolas Namoradze is a visionary pianist and composer known for his innovative artistry. He came to international attention in 2018 upon winning the triennial Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, Canada and has since won international acclaim for his performances and recordings. A BBC Music Magazine Rising Star, Gramophone One to Watch and Musical America New Artist, he was bestowed the Pianist of the Year Award by the UK Critics’ Circle in 2022. His often sold-out recitals around the globe have been met with universal critical praise, and recent album releases have received extraordinary accolades, including the Choc de Classica, Record of the Month in Limelight, Instrumental Disc of the Month in BBC Music Magazine, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, Editor’s Choice in Presto Classical and Critics’ Choice in International Piano, as well as a first-place debut in the UK charts for classical instrumental albums.

Nicolas begins this season in North America with Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in San Antonio, before a residency at the University of Ottawa as well as several other concerts across Canada and a recital in New York. Back in Europe, he returns to the Konzerthaus Dortmund for his second residency there, Prinzregententheater in Munich and London’s Wigmore Hall amongst other recitals. He also appears on jury panels for the Busoni Competition and Honens Competition.

Highlights of last season include a jump-in for Yefim Bronfman in a series of performances of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the broadcast of which was named by medici.tv as one of nine all-time greatest performances by former piano competition winners, alongside luminaries such as Argerich, Perahia, Pollini and Uchida in a “prizewinner to pantheon” lineup.  Another jump-in at the Montreal Bach Festival received a slew of glowing reviews and led La Scena Musicale to call him a “a peerless poet… a sumptuous pianist, a sound philosopher.” Further recent critical highlights include rare five-star reviews in The Telegraph and The Guardian, which called his performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall “ideally laconic and debonair, weighty yet exquisite, and exactingly precise in tone and touch.” A cover feature in International Piano declared his recital at Wigmore Hall “astonishing,” concluding that, “with so many talents and interests it is impossible to predict what this young man will go on to do: all we can be sure of is that it will be both original and unexpected.”

Other activities include residencies at the Verbier Festival, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and the Konzerthaus Dortmund for a second consecutive year, recital appearances at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Munich’s Isarphilharmonie, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, Kulturpalast Dresden and LuganoMusica, among others, and a series of performances with multiple Canadian orchestras of a new piano concerto written for him by Kati Agócs. Highlights of recent seasons include recitals at Carnegie Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan and Boston’s Gardner Museum, festival appearances at Tanglewood, Banff, Gstaad, Festival Radio France Montpellier, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Portland Piano International and others, and performances with orchestras including the London Philharmonic, Dresdner Philharmonie, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Milwaukee Symphony and the RAI Orchestra, with conductors such as Karina Canellakis, Hans Graf, Jeffrey Kahane, John Axelrod, Ken-David Masur, Finnegan Downie-Dear and Daniele Rustioni.

Highlights of his work as a composer include commissions and performances by leading artists and ensembles including Ken-David Masur, Lukas Ligeti, Tessa Lark, Metropolis Ensemble and the Momenta, Verona and Barkada Quartets, at festivals such as the Chelsea Music Festival, Honens Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Portland Piano International and the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, and several album releases on the Steinway & Sons label. He has also composed and produced a number of film soundtracks, including Le chant des étoiles, produced by the Musée Unterlinden, and Nuit d’opéra à Aix, made in association with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. His compositions are published by the Japan-based Muse Press.

Namoradze is actively involved in new directions in pedagogy and audience engagement, informed by his background in music-related fields in the cognitive sciences. His doctoral thesis at the CUNY Graduate Center developed mathematical models for aspects of musical perception, winning the Barry Brook Award for dissertation of the year. It is now published by Springer as the book “Ligeti’s Macroharmonies” in the Computational Music Science series. He furthered this work through a postgraduate degree in neuropsychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, where his research interests included new perspectives on musical pedagogy and performance. Namoradze presents innovative approaches to music appreciation through “mindful recitals,” a concert format that intersperses musical performances with thought experiments and meditation exercises. Namoradze is also the creator of IDAGIO Mindfulness – a multimedia platform exploring intersections between music and the cognitive sciences – on IDAGIO, the world’s leading classical music streaming app.

Namoradze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1992 and grew up in Budapest, Hungary. After completing his undergraduate in Budapest, Vienna and Florence, he moved to New York for his master’s at The Juilliard School and his doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center, holding the Graduate Center Fellowship. His teachers and mentors have included Emanuel Ax, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Zoltán Kocsis, Oleg Maisenberg, Matti Raekallio, András Schiff and Eliso Virsaladze in piano, and John Corigliano in composition. After serving on the faculty of Queens College, where he taught chamber music, composition and music history, he now teaches piano and chamber music on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center and The Juilliard School.

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