Vassilis Varvaresos

Greek pianist Vassilis Varvaresos, born in Thessaloniki in 1983, became the youngest winner in the history of the Young Concert Artists competition in New York in 1998, at the age of 14. His recital debuts in New York and Washington, D.C., received widespread critical acclaim. A Washington Post headline called Vassilis ‘a young master on the wave’.Vassilis Varvaresos is also the winner of the 2014 Enescu competition in Bucharest and the 2015 Monte Carlo Piano Masters.

 

Vassilis has performed solo recitals at: Tonhalle/Zurich, Megaron/Athens and Musikverein/Vienna, and has given several concerts at the prestigious Salle Gaveau in Paris. He is invited to international festivals, including: Chopin Festival/Nohant, Lisztomanias/Chateauroux, Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad, Enescu Festival, Festival des Arcs, Festival du Classique au Vert in Paris, Gyorgy Cziffra Foundation's Liszt Dream Festival and the Athens Festival. In 2022, Vassilis appeared at Athens Megaron Hall for a charity concert for Ukraine together with violinist Leonidas Kavakos.

 

 Recent concert appearances include a collaboration with Christoph Eschenbach, with whom Vassilis performed Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto with the Athens State Symphony Orchestra. He also performed the following programmes during the past season: Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 in the Herod Atticus Theatre at the Epidauros Festival of Athens; Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in Megaron/Saloniki and in Timisoara/Romania,

both Mendelssohn Piano Concertos with the Orchestre International de Genève under the direction of Lucie Leguay, Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Orchestre de Normandie, Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Freiburg Symphony Orchestra, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 and 5 with the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra, Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Bilkent Symphony, Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 4 with the St. Petersburg Chamber Orchestra and Ravel Concerto for the Left Hand with the Bremerhaven Philharmonie.

 

Vassilis Varvaresos works with conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach, Alexander Shelley, Justus Frantz, Ovidiu Marinescu, Dionysis Grammenos, Lucie Leguay, Alexander Bloch and Vassilis Christopoulos.

 

As a committed chamber musician, he has also performed at the Bozar Theatre in Brussels, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Diligentia Theatre in The Hague and the Gasteig in Munich. His regular musical partners include leading French musicians such as Ophelie Gaillard, Michel Dalberto, Yan Levionnois, Henri Demarquette and Nicolas Dautricourt, as well as violinist Noé Inui and cellists Ella van Poucke and Anastasia Kobekina.

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Since his American debut, at the age of 15, Vassilis has given recitals at major venues in New York such as Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall and Morgan Library; in Washington, D.C., he has performed at the Kennedy Center, among others. In March 2012, he had his first solo recital at Carnegie Hall, after which he was invited by President Obama to perform at the White House. Vassilis Varvaresos represented Greece with the Athens State Symphony Orchestra at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and was named ‘Most Promising Young Greek Artist’ by the Critics Association of Greece.

 

Vassilis holds bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in music from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Jerome Lowenthal, Yoheved Kaplinsky and Robert MacDonald. He is a graduate of the prestigious Diplôme d' Artiste-Interprète at the Conservatoire Nationale et Superieurde Musique et de Danse in Paris, France, under the direction of Michel Dalberto.

Vassilis Varvaresos' latest solo album “V for Valse” was released in 2018 on

Aparte Records in France.

 

In addition to his prolific career as a pianist, Vassilis Varvaresos, who lives in Paris, is also involved in composing. He has written music for ten films and several TV series, and wrote the book Departure From the Functionality of Syntax, which was awarded the Scholastic Distinction Award at the Juilliard School.

 

Vassilis Varvaresos holds the position of professor at the Conservatories of Music in Athens and Thessaloniki.

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