Jan Lisiecki

Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki turns thirty in 2025 yet, at this young age, he has a remarkable and highly successful career behind him already. He has worked with some of the world’s most illustrious conductors, among them Claudio Abbado, Antonio Pappano and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and he has performed alongside the finest world orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris and the London Symphony Orchestra. When the British magazine Gramophone included Lisiecki’s recording of Fryderyk Chopin’s Études among the fifty greatest Chopin albums ever made, the young pianist found himself alongside such luminaries as Arthur Rubinstein, Martha Argerich and Murray Perahia. “Lisiecki gives us tone poems first and studies second, his technique as unobtrusive as it is effortlessly fluent, lissom and precise,” wrote the prestigious British magazine, while The New York Times described his performance as “pristine, lyrical and intelligent”. 

Lisiecki will appear at the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival with a cleverly conceived programme constructed exclusively upon the prelude form – a short composition which originally served merely as an introduction to other, more complex works. “A master of the short form, Chopin brought the prelude out from the shadows and into the spotlight”, Lisiecki states, explaining why the major cycle 24 Preludes Op. 28 by his favourite composer represents the culmination of the concert. He will also be performing the most celebrated preludes in the piano repertoire – Bach’s Prelude in C major from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier and Prelude in C sharp minor by Sergei Rachmaninov, early preludes by Olivier Messiaen, which the young French composer wrote under the influence of Claude Debussy, and preludes by Polish composers Karol Szymanowski and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki.