Gerardo Teissonnière

Pianist Gerardo Teissonnière specializes not only in Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven but also in 20th century keyboard music. He is a notable educator. Teissonnière was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on March 29, 1961. He took up the piano when he was young and attended the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico in San Juan, studying with Jesús María Sanromá. Teissonnière went on to the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with Vitya Vronsky. Both Sanromá and Vronsky had been students of Artur Schnabel and Alfred Cortot. Teissonnière went on to the Aspen Music Festival, where he took classes from Jeaneane Dowis from the Juilliard School and rounded off his education in Europe with Dmitri Bashkirov and Joaquín Achúcarro. Teissonnière's breakthrough was a critically acclaimed debut recital at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1999. In 2004, he played a complete cycle of Mozart's piano sonatas in recital, and the following year, he was invited to Poland to perform in conjunction with the Chopin International Piano Competition. An enthusiastic devotee of 20th century music, Teissonnière has given world premieres of works by Alberto Ginastera, Arvo Pärt, and Pablo Casals, among many others. He joined the faculty of his alma mater, the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he won the 2008 Alumni Achievement Award. Teissonnière's performing career has been international, including concerts at halls across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, as well as at the Diaoyucheng International Music Festival in Chongqing, China. He also made solo recital and concerto debuts in Beijing. In 2019, Teissonnière began a cycle of recitals devoted to the complete sonatas of Beethoven as the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth approached. That cycle spawned a recording of Beethoven's final three piano sonatas on the Steinway & Sons label, Teissonnière's debut, in 2022.
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