Nicolas Namoradze
CUNY Graduate Center
Nicolas Namoradze is a visionary pianist and composer known for his innovative artistry. He came to international attention in 2018 upon winning the triennial Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, Canada, and has since garnered international acclaim for his performances and recordings. A Musical America New Artist, BBC Music Magazine Rising Star and Gramophone One to Watch, he was bestowed the Pianist of the Year Award by the UK Critics’ Circle in 2022. His often sold-out recitals around the globe have been met with glowing critical praise, and recent album releases on the Honens, Hyperion and Steinway labels have received extraordinary accolades, including the Choc de Classica, Record of the Month in Limelight, Instrumental Disc of the Month in BBC Music Magazine, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, Editor’s Choice in Presto Classical and Critics’ Choice in International Piano, as well as a first-place debut in the UK charts for classical instrumental albums.
Namoradze begins this season in San Antonio with Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand before a series of recitals across Canada. Further orchestral appearances include performances with the Calgary Philharmonic, Moravian Philharmonic, Georgian Philharmonic and Sarasota Festival Orchestras. Recital highlights include appearances at Munich’s Prinzregententheater, the Meisterkonzerte Homburg and London’s Wigmore Hall. He returns to the Konzerthaus Dortmund and Verbier Festival for a second year of residencies and appears as a guest artist in residencies at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Sarasota Music Festival. He also serves on jury panels for the Busoni and Honens competitions.
Following a broadcast from a series of performances last season of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, medici.tv included the concert as one of nine all-time greatest performances by former piano competition winners in a “prizewinner to pantheon” lineup and named him among thirty-five pianists in their list of “history’s most celebrated pianists.” Further critical highlights include five-star reviews in The Telegraph and The Guardian, which called his performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall “ideally laconic and debonair, weighty yet exquisite, and exactingly precise in tone and touch.” A cover feature in International Piano declared his recital at Wigmore Hall “astonishing,” his playing “unfolding in an opalescent glow, every bar touched with beauty… exultant and never less than technically immaculate.”
Other recent activities include residencies at the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and the Dresdner Philharmonie, recital appearances at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Munich’s Isarphilharmonie, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, Kulturpalast Dresden and LuganoMusica, among others, and a series of performances with multiple Canadian orchestras of a new piano concerto commissioned for him by Kati Agócs. He has appeared in recital at Carnegie Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan and Boston’s Gardner Museum, festival appearances at Tanglewood, Banff, Gstaad, Festival Radio France Montpellier, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Portland Piano International and others, and performed with orchestras including the London Philharmonic, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Milwaukee Symphony and the RAI Orchestra, with conductors such as Karina Canellakis, Hans Graf, Jeffrey Kahane, John Axelrod, Ken-David Masur, Finnegan Downie-Dear and Daniele Rustioni.
Highlights of his work as a composer include commissions and performances by leading artists and ensembles including Ken-David Masur, Lukas Ligeti, Tessa Lark, Metropolis Ensemble and the Momenta, Verona and Barkada Quartets, at festivals such as the Chelsea Music Festival, Honens Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Portland Piano International and the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, and several album releases on the Steinway label. He has also composed and produced a number of film soundtracks, including Le chant des étoiles, produced by the Musée Unterlinden, and Nuit d’opéra à Aix, made in association with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. His compositions are published by the Japan-based Muse Press.
Namoradze is also involved in new directions in performance and audience engagement. His doctoral thesis at the CUNY Graduate Center developed mathematical models for aspects of musical perception, winning the Barry Brook Award for dissertation of the year. It is now published by Springer as the book “Ligeti’s Macroharmonies” in the Computational Music Science series. He furthered this research through postgraduate studies at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, where his interests included new perspectives on musical performance. Informed by this work, Namoradze presents recital formats that reimagine the concert experience through a range of innovative projects, including moderated recitals with a focus on deep listening and interdisciplinary collaborations with scientific research. He is also the creator of a digital platform exploring intersections between music and the cognitive sciences on IDAGIO, the world’s leading classical music streaming app.
Namoradze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1992 and grew up in Budapest, Hungary. After completing his undergraduate studies in Budapest, Vienna and Florence, he moved to New York for his master’s at The Juilliard School and his doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center, holding the Graduate Center Fellowship. His teachers and mentors have included Emanuel Ax, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Zoltán Kocsis, Matti Raekallio, András Schiff and Eliso Virsaladze in piano, and John Corigliano in composition. After serving on the faculty of Queens College, where he taught chamber music, composition and music history, he now is on the piano and chamber music faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches at The Juilliard School.
Photo Credit: Tina Krohn
