Pascal Amoyel

Pianist Pascal Amoyel is best known for his performances of solo piano music by Liszt, Chopin, and Scriabin and for duo performances in a variety of repertory with cellist Emmanuelle Bertrand. He is also an actor, composer, and author. Amoyel has a varied recording catalog featuring several albums of music by Chopin but also late Romantic and post-Romantic music by Scriabin, Grieg, and others. In 2024, he and Bertrand released the recital album Cello Dreams: Berceuses pour violoncelle et piano. Amoyel was born in Rozay-en-Brie in north central France on January 2, 1971. He showed unusual talent as a youngster and was admitted to the École Normale de Musique in Paris when he was ten. There, he caught the attention of György Cziffra and became part of a teacher-student lineage stretching back to Franz Liszt. Amoyel continued to study with Cziffra at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSM), enrolling there at 17. His principal teachers there were Jacques Rouvier and Pascal Devoyon. He took first prizes at the Conservatoire in solo piano and chamber music and won the International Competition of Young Pianists in Paris in 1994. Amoyel's solo career grew throughout the 1990s, and in 1999, he met cellist Emmanuelle Bertrand. The two have performed as a duo ever since. He made his recording debut with her in 2001 on the album Emmanuelle Bertrand Plays Alkan and Liszt. Amoyel continued to cultivate his solo career as well, releasing a double album of Chopin's complete nocturnes on the Calliope label in 2004. He has performed across Europe, Britain, North America, and Japan, focusing on Romantic and post-Romantic repertory but also playing contemporary music by such composers as Olivier Greif, Pierre Schaeffer, Bechara El Khoury, and Aubert Lemeland. Unusually, Amoyel is also an actor who has written and performed in several theatrical shows, including "Block 15" and the one-man productions "The Pianist with 50 Fingers, or the Incredible Destiny of György Cziffra," "The Day I Met Franz Liszt," and "Looking for Beethoven." Amoyel has continued to record, both as a soloist (as on a 2008 album of Liszt's Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses) and with Bertrand. With her, he issued an album of Brahms sonatas and Liebeslieder in 2022 and the recital Cello Dreams in 2024. Those albums, like many of Amoyel's others, appeared on the Harmonia Mundi label. He has received several French national honors, including being named Chevalier in the Order of Academic Palms in 2020. ~ James Manheim, Rovi