Associate professor, pianist.
Born in Lyon in 1957, he chose to learn the piano at the age of five. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, then in London, Budapest and Moscow. At the age of sixteen, he won first prize in the Olivier Messiaen International Competition and began his concert career. At nineteen, he was chosen by Pierre Boulez as solo pianist with the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
He worked closely with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Kurtag, Elliott Carter, George Benjamin, Marco Stroppa and, from the mid-1980s, György Ligeti, for whom he premiered all new piano works.
Since 1990, he has taught chamber music at the Conservatoire de Paris and piano at the Hochschule Cologne. He is Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
In the late 1990s, he recorded the complete Beethoven concertos with Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He gives concerts in all the major international centers, as soloist, chamber musician or vocal accompanist. At the head of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, he performs the complete Mozart concertos.
The world's greatest concert halls entrust him with "cartes blanches": Carnegie Hall in New York, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Paris Opéra, the Lucerne Festival. In 2007, he recorded Bach's L'Art de la Fugue and a Hommage à Messian for Deutsche Gramophon, with whom he signed an exclusive contract. In 2008, a "Domaine Privé" was dedicated to him at the Cité de la Musique.
