Art Of Piano 2026

Saluée comme « exquise » par le Philadelphia Inquirer et « pianiste d’un talent exceptionnel » par Gramophone, la pianiste Michelle Cann, lauréate d’un Grammy Award, est l’une des artistes les plus recherchées de sa génération. Parmi ses engagements récents, citons des apparitions avec l’Orchestre symphonique de Chicago, l’Orchestre de Cleveland, l’Orchestre de Philadelphie, l’Orchestre philharmonique de Los Angeles, l’Orchestre symphonique national et l’Orchestre symphonique municipal de São Paulo. Elle a reçu la médaille d’excellence Sphinx et le prix Andrew Wolf de musique de chambre, et a été la première partenaire artistique Christel DeHaan des American Piano Awards.

Parmi les temps forts de la saison 2025-2026 de Cann, citons ses apparitions avec le Colorado Symphony, le New Jersey Symphony, le Kansas City Symphony et l’Orchestre symphonique national d’Irlande. Elle interprète également en première mondiale un nouveau concerto pour piano de Valerie Coleman avec l’Orchestre symphonique national à Washington, D.C. Elle se produit en récital notamment à Stanford Live, Music Toronto, Chamber Music Detroit, au Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, au Spivey Hall, et effectue une tournée de récitals en Chine.

Reconnu comme l’un des meilleurs interprètes de la musique pour piano de Florence Price, Cann a donné la première new-yorkaise du Concerto pour piano en un mouvement de Price avec le Dream Unfinished Orchestra en 2016. Son enregistrement du concerto avec le New York Youth Symphony a remporté un Grammy Award en 2023 dans la catégorie « Meilleure performance orchestrale ». Elle a remporté un Grammy Award en 2025 pour Beyond the Years : Unpublished Songs of Florence Price, enregistré avec la soprano Karen Slack, qui comprend 19 chansons inédites composées par Price. Son premier album solo acclamé, Revival, comprenant des compositions de Price et Margaret Bonds, est sorti en 2023. 

Cann est titulaire d’une licence et d’une maîtrise du Cleveland Institute of Music et d’un diplôme d’artiste du Curtis Institute of Music. Elle a rejoint la faculté de piano du Curtis Institute of Music en 2020 en tant que première titulaire de la chaire Eleanor Sokoloff en études pianistiques, et elle enseigne également le piano à la Manhattan School of Music.
 

Image by Titilayo Ayangade.

Composer and pianist Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

2023/24 highlights include a solo recital debut for Carnegie Hall, new commissions for the Moab Music Festival and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a tour with the Calder Quartet including performances at San Francisco Performances and Chamber Music Albuquerque, and the world premiere of a piano concerto for Aaron Diehl at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by John Adams. Andres’s orchestrations and arrangements for Justin Peck’s new production of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise, were premiered in a sold-out Summer 2023 run at The Fisher Center at Bard; the production has upcoming dates in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.

Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

As a pianist, Timo Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, among others. He has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, and Wigmore Hall.

Collaborators include Becca Stevens, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel Kahane, Brad Mehldau, Nadia Sirota, and Philip Glass, who selected Andres as the recipient of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his performances on 2021’s The Arching Path, an album of music by Christopher Cerrone.

Andres’s collaborations with Sufjan Stevens also include his May 2023 recording with Conor Hanick of Stevens’s latest album, Reflections; arrangements of ballets for New York City Ballet, and a solo piano album, The Decalogue.

A Nonesuch Records artist, Timo Andres has multiple solo albums on the label (with more set for upcoming release in 2024) and is featured as composer and pianist on the May 2020 release I Still Play, an album celebrating Robert Hurwitz. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School.

Joanna MacGregor CBE is one of the world’s most innovative musicians, appearing as a concert pianist, curator and conductor. Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and Professor of University of London, Joanna MacGregor was the Artistic Director of Dartington International Summer School & Festival 2014-2019, Artistic Director of the Bath International Music Festival 2006-2012, and curated the multi-arts Deloitte Ignite Festival at the Royal Opera House, as well as Aventures+, an orchestral series for Luxembourg Philharmonie. She runs an annual Summer Piano Festival at the Royal Academy, involving over a hundred young musicians playing core repertoire as well as collaborating with composers, actors, visual artists, writers and filmmakers. Joanna has just been appointed Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Brighton Philharmonic, as it approaches its centenary.

Eric Le Sage is established as a famous representative of the French piano school, regularly boasted for his very subtle sound, his real sense of structure and poetic phrasing. Already when he was 20 years old, the Financial Times had described him as “an extremely cultivated disciple of the great French tradition of Schumann piano”. In 2010, die Zeit, praised his “ideal French piano aesthetics and clarity”.

Eric is invited to perform as a soloist with orchestras at the highest level such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Saint-Louis Symphony Orchestra, Berlin’s Konzerthaus Orchester, SWR Symphony Orchestra, Bremer Philharmoniker, Dresden Philharmonie, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Göteborg Symphony Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra, Münchner Kammer Orchester, Dresdner Philharmonie, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, with conductors like Edo de Waart, Stéphane Denève, Pablo Gonzalez, Fabien Gabel, Sir Jeffrey Tate, François Leleux, Alexander Liebreich, Kazuki Yamada, Alondra de la Parra, Lionel Bringuier, François Leleux, Michael Stern, Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, Sir Simon Rattle and Yannick Nézet-Seguin.

Eric has performed recitals and chamber music concerts in major venues across the world such as Wigmore Hall, Suntory Hall, Carnegie Hall, Hamburg’s Laeiszhalle, Paris Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Radio France, Cologne Philharmonie, Essen Philharmonie, Dresden Philharmonie, Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Schwartzenberg’s Schubertiade, Salzburg Mozarteum, Ludwigsburg Festival, Prague’s Rudolfinium, Taipei National Concert Hall, Konzerthaus Vienna, Luxembourg Philharmonie, Dublin’s celebrity series, Edinburgh International Festival, Düsseldorf Tonhalle, la Roque d’Anthéron Festival, Potsdam Sanssouci, Brussels’ Bozar, Berlin’s Boulezsaal, Konzerthaus Berlin, Berlin Philharmonie.

Eric Le Sage released many albums, all of which were critically acclaimed and received multiple awards. Besides his world-famous Schumann cycle in 2010 that were awarded the very prestigious Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, other milestones include Francis Poulenc's complete chamber works with piano (BMG, 1998), Fauré¹s complete works for chamber music with piano, and Brahms complete chamber music works (B-Records, 2021).

Two magnificent albums were released in 2022: A Mozart album under the baton of his longtime stage partner François Leleux and the Gävle Symphony Orchestra on Alpha (concertos n° 17&24) and a solo album on Sony Classical featuring rare French repertoire from the beginning of the 20th century. In the last few years Eric released Fauré’s complete Nocturnes on Alpha (2019) and Beethoven's last 3 Sonatas (2014). Other recent chamber music recordings include collaborations with such artists as tenor Julian Pregardien for a Schumann album (2019) or Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Daishin Kashimoto, Aurélien Pascal and more for albums around repertoire from Vienna in the 1900s, and works by Nino Rota.

A true chamber music lover, Eric regularly plays with friends like Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Quatuor Ebène, François Leleux, Jean-Guihen Queyras, les Vents Français, François Salque, Lise Berthaud, Daishin Kashimoto, Claudio Bohorquez, Julian Prégardien, Sandrine Piau, Olivier Latry and many other musicians.

Born in Aix en Provence, Eric Le Sage was the winner of major international competitions such as Porto in 1985 and the Robert Schumann competition in Zwickau, in 1989. He was also a prize-winner at Leeds International competition the same year, which allowed him to perform under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle. Eric Le Sage is Professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany.

Tema Blackstone’s rich and varied life in music has grown out of her career as a pianist. Her influential work encompasses advocacy of music and musicians as a force for personal and societal well-being, and the passing on of the legacy of great music to new generations. She is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard’s Pre-College division in New York. As a public speaker, Ms. Blackstone raises awareness of the positive effects of the arts on society, describing how music and medicine reflect and enhance one another. She champions this cause as musician and lecturer wherever she travels, from Boston, New York, Calgary and Toronto to France, Switzerland and China. Her impressive concert career encompasses solo engagements as well as piano duo performances with Hung-Kuan Chen, to whom she is married. The couple often teaches as a team and has performed worldwide.