Jean-Efflam Bavouzet

Piano

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“…he makes you listen to music as if you are discovering it Eureka!-style: yes, that’s what the composer must have meant.”
(Financial Times)

Award-winning pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet enjoys a prolific recording and international concert career and regularly works with orchestras such as The Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and NHK Symphony orchestras, and collaborates with conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Vladimir Jurowski, Gianandrea Noseda, François-Xavier Roth, Charles Dutoit, Gábor Takács-Nagy and Sir Andrew Davis amongst others.

Highlights during the 2017/18 season include returns to San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, NHK Symphony and BBC Symphony orchestras. Bavouzet will appear at the Philharmonie de Paris with Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo and also performs with Detroit and Melbourne symphony orchestras, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Royal Scottish National and the City of Birmingham Symphony orchestras.

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (excerpt) with Juraj Valčuha © Hr-Sinfonieorchester

Bavouzet records exclusively for Chandos and his numerous recordings have won a number of Gramophone Awards and BBC Music Magazine Awards as well as a Diapason d’Or and Choc de l’année.Together with Manchester Camerata and Gábor Takács-Nagy, Bavouzet has recorded several of Haydn’s Piano Concertos and embarked on a series of Mozart concertos, which have been critically acclaimed. Other recent recordings include the complete Beethoven Sonatas and an ongoing project to record the Haydn Piano Sonatas.

In recital, Bavouzet regularly performs at venues such as The Louvre in Paris and London’s Wigmore Hall and has collaborated with composer Jörg Widmann in a chamber music project at the Prinzregententheater in Munich. To mark the anniversary of Debussy’s death, Bavouzet will perform an extended recital programme of all Debussy’s works which will be presented by the Barbican Centre at Milton Court and at the 2018 Perth International Arts Festival. He will give numerous recitals throughout Europe, UK and in North America.

Bavouzet has worked closely with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Kurtág, Maurice Ohana and Bruno Mantovani and is also a champion of lesser-known French music, notably that of Gabriel Pierné and Albéric Magnard. He is the International Chair in Piano at the Royal Northern College of Music.

Gallery

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Debussy: Images (Book one) Reflets Dans L’eau with Juraj Valčuha © Hr-Sinfonieorchester

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Debussy: Complete Piano Works (excerpt) © Chandos

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Haydn: Piano Sonatas Vol. 1 (excerpt) © Chandos

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Massenet: Toccata (excerpt) © Chandos

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - Beethoven: Sonata No. 2 (excerpt) © Chandos

“A five-star experience was the appearance of French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet…he is one of the world’s outstanding pianists in French repertoire”

(Sächsische Zeitung, Jens-Uwe Sommerschuh, November 2017)

“…he was magnificent in Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, giving a louche bravura to the music’s many moods. Most pianists play the opening theme sotto voce, to give themselves the best chance of making the following crescendo as mighty as possible. Bavouzet flung it out with statuesque nobility, judging he had power enough to spare, and he was right.”

(The Telegraph, Ivan Hewett and John Allison, October 2017)

“His performance of this effervescent composition was without technical flaw. The opening Allegramente crackled with energy”

(Performing Arts Hub, David Barmby, September 2017)

“The final romp of a finale exuded wit and charm, driving rhythms prevailing throughout with the pianist’s touch ranging from utmost delicacy to the incisive precision of the syncopated staccato chords”

(Classic Melbourne, September 2017)

“Bavouzet injected a sense of mystery to the fantasy section and made smart work of Mozart’s rather flashy cadenza.”

(Robert Beale, The Arts Desk, March 2017)

“The music is lit with quick wit, intelligence, and shafts of tenderness”

(The Financial Times, December 2016)

“there are few pianists with the recreative fantasy that Bavouzet brings to just about everything he plays.”

(Gramophone, November 2016)

“The solo playing sparkles, the orchestra is alive with detail, everything a delight.”

(Richard Fairman, Financial Times, October 2016)

“Assured in his own art, he commands a fully matured artistry, lacking neither subtlety or dynamism.”

(Santa Barbara News-Press, April 2016)

“Expansive, beautifully realized, but never lacking in virtuosity. This was music-making that was controlled but seemingly spontaneous and on occasion, electrifying. Little wonder that the capacity audience jumped to its feet at the end. I can’t remember a performance so completely satisfying.”

(Seen and Heard, February 2016)

“Pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, first heard here playing Prokofiev, mirrored his caffeinated 2010 debut with Ravel of the most vibrant, eye-opening sort. In the outer movements, Bavouzet wielded touches both hard-edged and feathery, imbuing Ravel’s ceaselessly active music with the strongest doses of whatever character it demanded. Yet never did he fail as a collaborator; Throughout, the pianist mimicked and engaged the harp, woodwinds and strings in pointed conversation. The pinnacle was the Adagio. Out of its touching solo theme, Bavouzet and orchestra crafted a lavish and ultimately hugely impassioned episode, one that developed naturally and boasted limpid contributions from soloists all over the ensemble. Their music contained not just all the color absent from the region but also the warmth.”

(The Plain Dealer, February 2016)

“This was, I thought, a Beethoven performance of undeniable greatness: not different for the sake of it, but asserting its – and Beethoven’s – difference through a Pollini-like re-examination of the material(…) All Beethoven performances should, if only briefly, restore one’s faith in humanity; this one did.”

(Mark Berry, Seen and Heard, February 2016)

“Jean-Efflam Bavouzet played the solo in Liszt’s second piano concerto with virtuoso panache and alertness to its changing moods, from tenderness to bombast.”

(Robert Beale, Manchester Evening News, February 2016)

“The evening’s highlight was Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s dashing account of the bimanual Ravel Piano Concerto, which combined technical facility with enormous musical sensibility to create a memorable performance.”

(Bachtrack, January 2016)

“The lovely opening to the A flat Sonata was beautifully done, with just the right spaciousness and clarity of fingering. It was in the final movement – by turns poetically reflective and fugally stern – that Bavouzet rose most fully to the challenge, creating momentum in the final pages that seemed to storm the heavens.”

(Martin Kettle, The Guardian, January 2016)