About

Tonight, the stage of the 9th Vilnius Piano Festival will be graced by French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, already familiar to our audience. A couple of years ago, he performed with the Manchester Camerata at the National Philharmonic Concert Hall.

According to the Financial Times, “he makes you listen to music as if you are discovering it. Eureka!” The pianist has performed as a soloist with Cleveland, San Francisco, London Philharmonic, BBC, NHK, Budapest Festival, Seoul, Taiwan, Monte Carlo Philharmonic, São Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo Metropolitan, and other symphony orchestras. Bavouzet has collaborated with conductors such as Gianandrea Noseda, Neeme Järvi, Daniele Gatti, Vladimir Jurowski, François-Xavier Roth, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Gábor Takács-Nagy, Nicholas Collon, Michele Spotti, and others. The pianist’s recordings have earned Gramophone, BBC, Diapason d’Or, and Choc de l’année awards, and have been repeatedly rated as the best by Choc-Classica and The New York Times magazines.

In this concert, Bavouzet presents the works of French impressionist Maurice Ravel, whose 150th birthday we are celebrating this year. The writer Romain Rolland, also renowned as an authoritative music historian and critic, named Ravel the greatest French musical artist, placing him alongside J.-Ph. Rameau and C. Debussy. Ravel, a younger contemporary of Debussy, was no less daring, possessed exceptionally rich imagination, impeccable compositional technique and artistic taste. He drew inspiration from the works of the old masters and his friendship with George Gershwin; he was fascinated by the colourful Spanish folklore as well as dance genre. If one had to describe Ravel and his work in a few words, it would be an extremely colourful personality with a multifaceted artistic universe.