András Schiff

A product of the Hungarian piano school, András Schiff has established himself as a leading international soloist and conductor. Born in Budapest on December 21, 1953, he took up the piano at the age of five, studying at the Franz Liszt Academy with Pal Kadosa and Ferenc Rados, then in Weimar with Tatiana Nikolaïeva and Bella Davidovich, before continuing his training in the UK with George Malcolm. After further piano and composition lessons with György Kurtág, the pianist entered competitions, winning fourth prize at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in 1974 and third prize at the Leeds Pianoforte Competition in 1975. He left Hungary to settle in the UK in 1979, and began an international career marked by recitals and collaborations with major orchestras. Considered one of the leading specialists of Bach's works for the modern piano, András Schiff has recorded the most important works, including the Six Partitas (1984), the Goldberg Variations (in 1986, then in 2003), the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (1986), the English Suites (1988) and the Concertos with Orchestra (1990). The pianist, who became an Austrian citizen in 1987 and a British citizen in 2001, is constantly expanding his repertoire on the Decca label. Director of Musiktage Mondsee, a chamber music festival near Salzburg, from 1989 to 1998, he also recorded the complete Mozart Piano Concertos with Sándor Végh and the Salzburg Camerata, followed by the complete Sonatas, among other recordings of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven, including the five Piano Concertos with Bernard Haitink and the Dresden Staatskapelle and the complete Piano Sonatas. He collaborates with the Takacs Quartet and his wife, violinist Yuko Shiokawa, accompanies tenor Peter Schreier and mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, and teaches master classes. Winner of a Grammy Award in 1990 and other honors from Siena's Académie Chigiana (1987), London's Bach Academy (2007), Wigmore Hall (2008), Zwickau's Schumann Academy (2011) and Salzburg's Mozarteum (2012), before being knighted by the United Kingdom in 2014, András Schiff formed the chamber music ensemble Cappella Andrea Barca in 1999 and trained as a conductor, leading the London Philharmonia, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Since 1999, he has been recording for the ECM New Series label, but in 2024 his former label published the retrospective The Complete Decca Recordings.