Lukáš Vondráček

A native of Opava and winner of the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition, Lukáš Vondráček is one of the finest pianists on the contemporary music scene. It would certainly not be an exaggeration to state that he started out as a child prodigy. He began playing the piano at the age of two, he performed in public when he was four years old, he made his first recording aged eleven, and he was fifteen when he performed with the Czech Philharmonic. A graduate of music schools in Katowice, Vienna and Boston, he was also guided by the legendary Vladimir Ashkenazy, who described him as the best young pianist of the last thirty years. The music critics also speak of him in superlatives. The daily broadsheet The Straits Times headlined him as “the master of perfectly voiced textures”. To date Vondráček has appeared in some of the world’s most illustrious venues, including Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. He recently gave his debuts with such orchestras as the London Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the Tokyo Metropolitan. The upcoming season sees his return to the Chicago Symphony and his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.