Jean-Marc Luisada

Pianist Jean-Marc Luisada is known as a Chopin specialist but has recorded music from Beethoven to the 20th century. He is also an enthusiastic chamber musician and a significant educator. Luisada was born in Bizerte, Tunisia, on June 3, 1958. Tunisia had already gained its independence from France, but Bizerte was located in a part of Tunisia where the French retained control for several more years. He took up the piano at age six. Later, his family moved to mainland France. Luisada studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School in England and then enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMD) when he was 16. His principal teachers there were Dominique Merlet and Marcel Ciampi on piano and Geneviève Joy-Dutilleux (the wife of composer Henri Dutilleux) in chamber music. He also took classes from Nikita Magaloff and Paul Badura-Skoda. A major breakthrough for Luisada was a fifth-place showing at the 11th International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1985. By the time he reached his 30th birthday, Luisada had toured in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. It still took some time for Luisada to land a major-label recording contract, but once he did, issuing a 1998 recording of the little-known chamber version of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11, with the Talich Quartet, he became internationally successful. He recorded for RCA for many years. Luisada has appeared in such major international venues at Wigmore Hall in London, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, and the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris. Luisada has been in demand at festivals, including the Paris Chopin Festival, the Festival de La Roque d'Anthéron, and La Folle Journée de Nantes. Chopin has been heavily represented in his recording catalog, but he has by no means restricted himself to that composer; he has devoted albums to composers ranging from Beethoven to Poulenc. Luisada has recorded for major labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, Sony Classical, and Decca. He moved to La Dolce Volta in 2021 for an album containing a pair of Schubert piano sonatas, and two years later, he returned there with Au cinéma ce soir, an album of works used in classic films from the 1950s to the '70s. Luisada teaches at the École Normale Alfred Cortot in Paris, and in 2022, he performed in Singapore with two of his students, Congyu Wang and Hayato Sumino. ~ James Manheim, Rovi