Nicolas Namoradze

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 critical praise, and recent album releases 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.

This season, Namoradze returns to London following an acclaimed recital at Wigmore Hall, and gives the UK premiere of his ground-breaking Neurorecital opening the season for Lancaster Arts. He returns to the Honens Competition for the Canadian premiere of his Neurorecital and also to curate the Honens Lab. He tours Germany with recitals in Kronberg, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and Munich’s Prinzregententheater, and returns to Cleveland and Santa Fe for their summer festivals. Concerto engagements include Ravel’s Piano Concerto at New York’s Kaufman Center and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.

Last season, Namoradze appeared in San Antonio performing Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, followed by a series of recitals across Canada. Other orchestral engagements included performances with the Calgary Philharmonic, Moravian Philharmonic and Sarasota Festival Orchestras. He continued his residency at the Konzerthaus Dortmund and returned to Verbier Festival, where he gave the world premiere of his Neurorecital – a pioneering performance combining live piano music with synchronised neural imagery developed in collaboration with research teams at Neuroscape (University of California, San Francisco) and the Brain Dynamics Lab (University of Calgary). Recital highlights included appearances at Munich’s Prinzregententheater, the Meisterkonzerte Homburg and Wigmore Hall, London. He also served on the jury panels of both the Busoni and Honens competitions.

Highlights of previous seasons include acclaimed performances of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, whose broadcast was named by medici.tv as one of nine all-time greatest performances by former piano competition winners, alongside Argerich, Perahia, Pollini and Uchida. His appearance at the Montreal Bach Festival earned high praise, with La Scena Musicale calling him “a peerless poet… a sumptuous pianist, a sound philosopher.” Further acclaim includes five-star reviews in The Telegraph and The Guardian, which described his Royal Festival Hall performance as “ideally laconic and debonair, weighty yet exquisite, and exactingly precise in tone and touch,” while International Piano hailed his Wigmore Hall recital as “astonishing… impossible to predict what this young man will go on to do: all we can be sure of is that it will be both original and unexpected.” Additional highlights include residencies with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and Dresdner Philharmonie, recitals at major venues such as Carnegie Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan and Boston’s Gardner Museum, and concerto performances with the London Philharmonic and Sinfonieorchester Basel under conductors including Karina Canellakis, Hans Graf and Jeffrey Kahane.

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 & Sons 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, informed by his background in music-related fields in the cognitive sciences. 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 work through a postgraduate degree at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, where his research interests included new perspectives on musical performance. Namoradze presents recital formats that reimagine the concert experience through a range of innovative projects, including lecture-recitals with a focus on deep listening, immersive multimedia performances, and interdisciplinary collaborations with scientific research. Namoradze is also the creator of IDAGIO Mindfulness – a digital platform exploring intersections between music and the cognitive sciences – on IDAGIO, the world’s leading classical music streaming app.

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia and raised in Budapest, Namoradze studied in Budapest, Vienna, Florence, New York and London with mentors including Emanuel Ax, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Zoltán Kocsis, Matti Raekallio, András Schiff and Eliso Virsaladze in piano, and John Corigliano in composition. He now serves on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center and deputizes at The Juilliard School.

For further information about Nicolas’ projects, please visit his project page.

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