Jonas Vitaud

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Pianist Jonas Vitaud is adventurous and versatile, playing mainstream repertory and also working closely with contemporary composers. He is also a noted educator. Vitaud was born in Paris on May 7, 1980. He started piano lessons at six, but, as he told Piano Bleu, "I discovered music before the instrument, through listening to Handel's Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music." His first teacher was not a pianist, but violinist Andrew Sherwood. When Vitaud enrolled at a local conservatory, "It was a cold shower... Everything was compartmentalized, systematized," but classes at the Paris Regional Conservatory with Chantal Fraysse fired his imagination once again, and he won several national French prizes. He also studied the organ during this period. In 1995, Vitaud entered the Paris Conservatory, studying with Brigitte Engerer and others. He won four of the school's coveted first prizes and went on to victories at international competitions in Vienna, Munich, Trieste, and other cities. Vitaud has performed concertos with the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Sinfonia Varsovia in Warsaw. His solo recital credits include one at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Vitaud has had various chamber music partners including violinist Mi-Sa Yang, clarinetist Raphaël Sévère, and cellist Victor Julien-Laferrière. He is a frequent presence at festivals internationally, including the Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, Autonno Musicale in Caserta, Italy, and iDANS in Istanbul, Turkey. Vitaud often champions contemporary music and has worked closely with composers Henri Dutilleux, György Kurtág, and Philippe Hersant, among others. Vitaud recorded an album of Brahms' piano music in 2011 for the Orchid Classics label before signing with Mirare and releasing albums of music by Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Mozart. In 2019, he joined Julien-Laferrière for a recital on the Alpha label of cello-and-piano works by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, and Edison Denisov.
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