At the piano François-Frédéric Guy made mesmerising colours, erupting into shivery cascades and subterranean rumbles, a magician with sound. The Times, Rebecca Franks, 18/05/2022
As an outstanding interpreter of the music of German Romantics and their forebears as well as contemporary compositions, François-Frédéric Guy is pursuing a steady international career as both a soloist and as an orchestral conductor from the piano. Alongside great conductors such as Philippe Jordan, Kent Nagano, Daniel Harding and Esa-Pekka Salonen, he has worked with renowned orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Seoul Philharmonic, or the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Most recently, he has performed with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the SWR Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Symphony Orchestra . A highlight of the current season will be his guest appearances with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Printemps des Arts in Monaco, where he will perform piano concertos by Bartók and Schönberg.
Like few others, François-Frédéric Guy vividly realizes the compositional architecture of great works of the Classical and Romantic periods. He developed this ability particularly through his intensive dialogue with the music of Beethoven. His performances of the cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas have already been celebrated worldwide, moste recently in Seoul. The pianist also has a special affinity for Bartók, Brahms, Liszt, and Prokofiev, as well as for contemporary music. He is closely associated with the composers Tristan Murail, Ivan Fedele, Marc Monnet, and Hugues Dufourt, among others. The latest concerto premiere was Tristan Murail’s piano concert L’oeil du cyclone, co-commissioned by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the Orchestra Philhamonique de Radio France, the BBC Symphony, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 2023/24.
François-Frédéric Guy regularly conducts Beethoven’s piano concertos as well as works by Mozart, Chopin, and Brahms from the piano and he now also appears on the conductor’s podium. In the dual role as pianist and conductor, he has been working closely for several years with the Sinfonia Varsovia as well as with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris, with whom he was artist-in-residence from 2017 to 2020. Guest appearances have also taken him to the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, and the Orchestre national des Pays de la Loire. Since the autumn of 2021, he has held the musical direction of the Swiss ensemble Microcosme in Genève.
Solo recitals have taken him to major concert halls in London, Milan, Berlin, Munich, Moscow, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Washington, and to festivals such as the Chopin Festival Warsaw, the Beethovenfest Bonn, the Cheltenham Festival, or the Piano Festivals in La Roque d’Anthéron and Lille. He was also artist-in-residence at the Arsenal de Metz from 2014 to 2017. Having been featured as portrait artist at Wigmore Hall in the 2022/23 season, he has since then returned to the hall with various chamber music partners. The current season sees him sharing the stage with the Danel Quartet in two concerts with piano quintets by Weinberg and Shostakovich.
The centrepiece of his discography is the complete recording of the Beethoven sonatas for the Zig-Zag Territoires label, which had already released his highly acclaimed Liszt album with the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. To kick off the “Beethoven Year 2020”, the complete recording of the Beethoven piano concertos under François-Frédéric Guy’s overall direction with the Sinfonia Varsovia was released. His 2017 Brahms album of the three piano sonatas was followed in spring 2021 by a recording of Brahms’s viola sonatas and trio. In 2023, he released A secret garden featuring selected works by Chopin, recorded on a restored Pleyel piano from 1905. In the field of contemporary music, he presented his recording of Marc Monnet’s piano cycle En Pièces in early 2021; a CD with the music of Tristan Murail and the Préludes of Debussy followed in 2022.
