Gilles Vonsattel
A "wanderer between worlds" (Lucerne Festival), "immensely talented" and "quietly powerful pianist" (New York Times).
Swiss-born American pianist Gilles Vonsattel is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2016 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award, a winner of the Naumburg and Geneva competitions, and prize winner at the Cleveland, Dublin, and Honens international competitions.
He has appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, San Francisco Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, while performing recitals and chamber music at Ravinia, Tokyo’s Musashino Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Lucerne Festival, Bravo! Vail, Chamber Music Northwest, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Music@Menlo.
He has premiered numerous works both in the United States and Europe and has worked closely with notable composers including Jörg Widmann, Heinz Holliger, Anthony Cheung, and George Benjamin. Recent projects include a performance of Carlos Chávez’s Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium with The Orchestra Now, a debut at Mainly Mozart, a critically acclaimed recording of music of Richard Strauss and Kurt Leimer with the Bern Symphony Orchestra and Mario Venzago for Schweizer Fonogramm, as well as multiple appearances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, of which he is an artist member.
He received his bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from Columbia University and his master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Jerome Lowenthal. Vonsattel is Professor of Piano at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.