Since Glenn Gould’s visit to Moscow and Van Cliburn’s victory at the Tchaikovsky Competition in the heat of the Cold War, never has a foreign pianist provoked such frenzy.”
Olivier Bellamy, THE HUFFINGTON POST
“Since Glenn Gould’s visit to Moscow and Van Cliburn’s victory at the Tchaikovsky Competition in the heat of the Cold War, never has a foreign pianist provoked such frenzy”. THE HUFFINGTON POST
“The art of Lucas Debargue is not just piano-playing but rather a true sound philosophy.” LE DEVOIR
“The incredible gift, artistic vision and creative freedom” of Lucas Debargue was revealed by his performances at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow in 2015 and distinguished with the coveted Prize of the Moscow Music Critics’ Association.
Today, Lucas is invited to play solo and with leading orchestras in the most prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Hall, The Kennedy Center, Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Boston’s Jordan Hall and Sanders Theatre, Maison de la Musique in Montreal, the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, Theatre des Champs Elysées and Philharmonie de Paris, London’s Wigmore Hall and Royal Festival Hall, Berlin Philharmonic, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the concert halls of Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, and of course the legendary Grand Hall of Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and the Mariinsky Concert Hall in St. Petersburg.
Lucas Debargue regularly collaborates with Valery Gergiev, Mikhail Pletnev, Vladimir Jurowski, Andrey Boreyko, Tugan Sokhiev, Vladimir Spivakov, Bertrand de Billy, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. His chamber music partners include Gidon Kremer, Janine Jansen, and Martin Frost.
Born in 1990, Lucas forged a highly unconventional path to success. Having discovered classical music at the age of 10, the future musician began to feed his passion and curiosity with diverse artistic and intellectual experiences, which included advanced studies of literature and philosophy. The encounter with the celebrated piano teacher Rena Shereshevskaya proved a turning point: her vision and guidance inspired Lucas to make a life-long professional commitment to music.
A performer of fierce integrity and dazzling communicative power, Lucas Debargue draws inspiration for his playing from literature, painting, cinema, jazz, and develops very personal interpretation of a carefully selected repertoire. Though the core piano repertoire is central to his career, he is keen to present works by lesser-known composers like Karol Szymanowski, Nikolai Medtner, or Miłosz Magin.
Lucas devotes a large portion of his time to composition and has already created over twenty works for piano solo and chamber ensembles. These include Orpheo di camera concertino for piano, drums and string orchestra, premiered by Kremerata Baltica, and a Piano Trio was created under the auspices of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. As a permanent artistic partner of Kremerata Baltica, Lucas has been commissioned to write a chamber opera on the subject of assisted suicide.
Sony Classical has released six of his albums with music of Scarlatti, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Medtner and Szymanowsky. His monumental four-volume tribute to Scarlatti, which came out at the end of 2019, has been praised by The New York Times and selected by NPR among “the 10 classical albums to usher in the next decade”. August 2021 sees the release of an album devoted to the Polish composer Miłosz Magin, a discovery of a fascinating musical personality, recorded with Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer.
Lucas’s breakthrough at the Tchaikovsky Competition is the subject of the documentary To Music. Directed by Martin Mirabel and produced by Bel Air Media, it was shown at the International Film Festival in Biarritz in 2018.”
