Béatrice Berrut

Associate Artist of the Festivals de Wallonie in 2023, Swiss pianist and composer Béatrice Berrut has been described by the Irish Times as "an artist who calmly reveals herself in multiple layers of genius and beauty" and "a remarkable musician in every category, who has given electrifying interpretations of the works of Chopin and Bach" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Inspired by Mahler's statement that "tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire", she is a daring musician who has written about Arnold Schoenberg's major work, "Transfigured Night", a paraphrase hailed by the composer's son and now sought after by the piano community. Her dynamic work as a soloist, composer, arranger and artistic director of the festival she founded in Switzerland, "Les Ondes", has positioned her as a cultural visionary on the European art scene.

Her adventures have taken her as a soloist on major European stages with orchestras such as the English Chamber Orchestra on a Mozart tour that included stops at London's Cadogan Hall and Geneva's Victoria Hall. She has performed in sold-out concerts broadcast live by German radio NOR at the Hannover Staatsoper with the Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester under legendary conductor Mario Venzago. She has also given recitals featuring her transcriptions of Mahler symphonies in such famous venues as Vienna's Konzerthaus and London's Wigmore Hall. Her art of transforming Mahler's titanic orchestra into rich, lush piano scores is much appreciated by her peers and the press alike, as witnessed by these lines from the newspaper Le Monde: "her treatment of Gustav Mahler's symphonies consists in transforming the solid gold of the orchestra into the liquid gold of the piano".

Her recordings draw on the legacies of European spirituality and mysticism, and explore the vast landscape of music by composers such as Bach and Liszt to create spaces for listeners to gather around a shared experience. Her award-winning discography and new collaboration with the French label La Dolce Volta have a strong media presence and have greatly contributed to establishing her as an artist who counts in the arts in Europe, enabling her to be invited for interviews and to appear on television programs such as Deutsche Welle's news, TV 5 Monde's cultural program, France 3's Victoires de la Musique, RTS, Classic FM or ARTE.

Convinced that there's only good music and bad music, Béatrice is at home in a variety of compositional genres, and has been commissioned to write works for both classical music series and films. Her music is rooted in the European tradition - with a particular touch of Ravel and colors close to Scriabin for their diabolical virtuosity - and blends with the ethereal influences of American minimalism and the heroic rhetoric of film music. Her creativity has also led her to reshape MUSE songs and Walt Disney classics to sound like virtuoso piano pieces by romantic composers such as Rachmaninoff, Chopin or Liszt. As Mark Twain would have said: "They didn't know it was impossible, so they did it!

Both an iconoclast and an ardent defender of the classical tradition, Béatrice's desire to democratize classical music and transcend the boundaries between genres led her to create her own festival, where concerts of traditional classical music rub shoulders with klezmer, jazz and flamenco.

She also enjoys collaborating with eclectic artists such as world ice-skating champion Stéphane Lambiel for a forthcoming show on the theme of magic, which will explore the initiatory journey of a child, or with the Bonn-based contemporary dance company "Cocoon Dance" for a performance around Beethoven's Trio Geister during the Beethovenfest. She was chosen by the Observatoire de l'Université de Genève and the European Space Agency (ESA) to play herself in a short film presenting the GAIA mission, in which parallels are drawn between the tasks of a concert pianist and those of an astrophysicist.

Béatrice Berrut has been a Bösendorfer artist since 2013. This long and fruitful collaboration between the Viennese company and the Swiss pianist is the hallmark of the slightly different sound of Béatrice's recordings.