Spain
With his commanding technique and searching interpretations, the celebrated Norwegian pianist has won acclaim worldwide, playing concertos and recitals in the world’s leading concert halls and with its foremost orchestras, while building an esteemed and extensive discography.
he is the founding director of the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival, was co-artistic director of the Risør Festival of Chamber Music for nearly two decades, and served as music director of California’s Ojai Music Festival in 2012. He was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in July 2013, and has received honorary doctorates from Norway’s Universities of Bergen and Oslo and New York’s Juilliard School.
Two concertos figure prominently in Andsnes’s 2024-25 season: Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Third. His most recent performances include concerts with renowned international orchestras, such as New York Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra, he reprises the work with Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Rome’s Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and on tour with the Oslo Philharmonic. He also colaborated with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Orchestre de Paris, and the Berlin Philharmoniker.
As the Mahler Chamber Orchestra's first Artistic Partner, Andsnes has already led the ensemble from the keyboard in two major, multi-season projects. In “Mozart Momentum 1785/86,” they explored one of the most creative and seminal periods of the composer’s career with live accounts of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 20–24, as well as recorded ones for Sony Classical. This followed the success of “The Beethoven Journey.” An epic four-season focus on the composer’s music for piano and orchestra, this took the pianist to 108 cities in 27 countries for more than 230 live performances. The project was chronicled in the documentary Concerto – A Beethoven Journey.
Andsnes’s discography comprises more than 50 titles – solo, chamber, and concerto releases, many of them bestsellers – spanning repertoire from the Baroque to the present day. He has been nominated for eleven Grammys and his many international prizes include seven Gramophone Awards. His recent releases include Dvořák’s unjustly neglected piano cycle Poetic Tone Pictures, Chopin: Ballades & Nocturnes, and the Billboard best-selling Sibelius.
Leif Ove Andsnes was born in Karmøy, Norway in 1970, and studied at the Bergen Music Conservatory. He is an Artistic Adviser at the city’s Prof. Jirí Hlinka Piano Academy, where he lives with his wife and their three children.
