Nicholas Angelich
December 14, 1970 — April 18, 2022
© Marc Ribes
About
Born in the United States in 1970, Nicholas Angelich began studying the piano at five with his mother. At the age of seven, he gave his first concert with Mozart’s Concerto K. 467. He entered at 13 the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris where he studied with Aldo Ciccolini, Yvonne Loriod, Michel Beroff and Marie Françoise Bucquet. He won the First Prize for piano and chamber music.
Nicholas Angelich followed master-classes with Leon Fleisher, Dmitri Bashkirov, and Maria Joao Pires. In 1989 he won the Second Prize of the International Piano Competition R. Casadesus in Cleveland and in 1994 the First Prize of the International Piano Competition Gina Bachauer. In 1996 he was invited as a resident of the International Piano Foundation of Cadennabia (Italy). In 2002 he received the “International Klavierfestival Ruhr - Young Talent Award” (Germany) from Leon Fleischer where he performed in June 2003.
He made his debuts in May 2003 with the New-York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur at the Lincoln Center in New-York. Valdimir Jurowski invited him to open with him the 2007/08 season of the Russian National Orchestra in Moscow.
He also performed with the Orchestre National de France under Marc Minkowski and Joseph Pons, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Paavo Järvi, Orchestre National de Lyon and David Robertson, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo under Jesus Lopez-Cobos and Kenneth Montgomery, Saint-Petersbourg Symphony under Alexandre Dimitriev, Strasbourg and Montpellier orchestras under Jerzy Semkow, Toulouse Orchestra under Jaap van Zweden in Amsterdam and Yannick Nezet-Sequin in San Sebastian, the Orchestre de chambre de Lausanne and Christian Zacharias, the SWR Baden-Baden orchestra and Michael Gielen, the Francfort Radio orchestra under Hugh Wolff and Paavo Jarvi, the Swiss-Italian Radio Orchestra and Charles Dutoit, the Tonkünstler Orchester and K. Järvi, the Seoul Philharmonic under M.-W. Chung, the London Philharmonic under Kazuchi Ono and Vladimir Jurowsky, as well as recitals in London, Munich, Geneva, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Rome, Lisbon, Brescia, Tokyo, Paris. He was a regular guest of the Verbier Festival and Martha Argerich’s festival in Lugano.
An excellent interpreter of classical and romantic repertoire, Nicholas Angelich played all Beethoven Sonatas and Liszt’s Années de Pélerinage in different countries. He also championed 20th-century music by composers like Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, Bartók, Ravel, as well as Messiaen, Stockhausen, Boulez, Eric Tanguy, and Pierre Henry, who dedicated to him the Concerto for piano without orchestra.
Always enthusiastic about playing chamber music, he often performed with Gautier and Renaud Capuçon, Maxim Vengerov, Akiko Suwanai, Dimitri Sitkovetsky, Joshua Bell, Julian Rachlin, Gérard Caussé, Alexander Kniazev, Jian Wang, and Paul Meyer, as well as the Ysaÿe, Pražák and Ebène Quartets.