Juho Pohjonen

Finland's Juho Pohjonen has emerged an as exciting new talent, performing both traditional and contemporary repertory. Pohjonen was born in Helsinki in 1981, and eight years later he enrolled at the Junior Academy of that city's Sibelius Academy. He remained a student there for almost two decades, working with teachers Meri Louhos and Hui-Ying Liu and taking master classes along the way from the likes of Leon Fleisher, András Schiff, Barry Douglas, and Jacob Lateiner. He took major prizes at the 2000 International Young Artists Concerto Competition in Stockholm, the 2002 Helsinki International Maj Lind Piano Competition, the 2003 AXA Dublin Piano Competition, and the 2004 Nordic Piano Competition in Denmark. In 2009 Schiff chose him for the Klavier Festival Ruhr Scholarship, and after that his career flowered. Pohjonen has been unusually active in the U.S. (especially in view of the fact that he was not trained there), giving recitals at both Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, at Kennedy Center in Washington, and at venues in Detroit, San Francisco, and suburban San Diego, as well as appearing as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Buffalo Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony, where he has forged an ongoing collaboration with music director Robert Spano. Pohjonen has also appeared at Wigmore Hall and other major British and European venues, and performed concerts with top orchestras in Scandinavia and elsewhere. The 2017-2018 season saw him on tour at major American festivals: Music@Menlo, the Santa Fe Chamber Music, Chicago's Ravinia, the Cleveland Orchestra's Blossom Festival, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. After recording Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's Plateaux for piano and orchestra with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra for the Dacapo label in 2009, Pohjonen joined with cellist Inbal Segev for a recital of works by Chopin, Schumann, and Grieg, released on Avie in 2018.
© James Manheim /TiVo