2021-07-22

Pianist Michel Beroff

Michel Beroff was born in France in 1950. After graduating from the Paris conservatoire in 1966, he won the following year the first prize at the first international Olivier Messiaen piano competition. He has been since considered one of the most outstanding interpreter of Messiaen’s music. He then went on to play with the most prestigious orchestras around the world under the direction of such conductors as Abbado, Barenboim, Bernstein, Boulez, Dohnanyi, Dorati, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Gielen, Inbal, Jochum, Leinsdorf, Masur, Ozawa, Previn, Rostropovitch, Sinopoli, Solti, Tennsted, Tilson-Thomas, Zinman. As a chamber music partner , he has been very active playing with Martha Argerich , Barbara Hendricks Jean- Philippe Collard, Augustin Dumay, Pierre Amoyal, Lynn Harrell. As a conductor, Michel Beroff has been conducting the chamber orchestra de la Scala de Milano, the Russian state Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Cannes chamber orchestra, the Berkeley symphony, the Montréal youth orchestra. He is currently teaching at the Paris Conservatoire.

 

Exclusive EMI artist for over 25 years, Michel Beroff has published more than 50 recordings ; among them the complete works for piano and orchestra from Liszt, Prokofieff and Stravinsky , conducted by Seiji Ozawa and Kurt Masur. For Deutsche Grammophon, he has recorded Ravel’s left hand concerto with the LSO and Claudio Abbado. His latest recordings includes the complete piano music from Debussy for the Japanese label Denon. Michel Beroff has been awarded five times the “Grand Prix du Disque”. As a publisher, he participated for Wiener Urtext , to a new edition of Debussy’s piano music. For the japanese network NHK, he realized, in 2006, a serie of fifteen master-classes on french music.

 

During the last seasons, Michel Beroff played with the LSO under Pierre Boulez, the New-York Philharmonic and Kurt Masur, as well as the London Philarmonic for an extensive tour to England and Spain. He undertook three japanese tours, uncluding one with the Philarmonia with Esa-Peka Salonen, played in concert in Paris the complete works for piano from Debussy and Janacek, and two Prokofieff  concerti with the Orchestre de Paris and Christophe Eschenbach. He also toured extensively in Germany, Holland, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Greece, Brasil, Korea.

 

In the past years, he has been serving as a jury member in many important piano competitions, including Tchaikovsky, Van Cliburn, Leeds, Clara Haskil, Rubinstein, and Marguerite Long competitions, among others.  Many of his students have won top prizes at international competitions ; the latest one has been SeongJin CHO, who won the Chopin competition in Warsaw in October 2016.