Biography

Idil Biret – Biography

Idil Biret manifested an outstanding gift at the age of three. After taking her first lessons in Turkey she went to France at the age of eight and was trained at the Paris Conservatory under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger graduating with three first prizes at the age of fifteen. She later studied with Alfred Cortot and was a lifelong disciple of Wilhelm Kempff. From the age of sixteen Idil Biret gave concerts throughout the world in the major concert halls like the Carnegie Hall in New York, Royal Festival Hall in London, Theatre Champs-Elysees in Paris, Herkules Saal in Munich, Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow and  with major orchestras like the Boston Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Warsaw Philharmonic, London Symphony, Leningrad Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Paris, Orchestre National de Belgique, Orchestre Suisse Romande under eminent conductors including Eric Leinsdorf, Pierre Monteux, Rudolph Kempe, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Sir Charles Mackerras, Antoni Wit. She has participated at many festivals, adjudicated  at major piano competitions including the Van Cliburn, Reine Elisabeth de Belgique, Busoni in Italy, Messiaen in France, Bechstein and Bayerische Rundfunk in Germany, Sviatoslav Richter in Russia  and received many awards and decorations in France, Italy, Poland, Turkey, England and USA. Idil Biret has made over one hundred LP/CDs including Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas  and all 9 Symphonies’ piano transcriptions by Liszt, the complete solo  piano works and concertos of Brahms, Chopin and Rachmaninov as well as the three Piano Sonatas of Boulez, the Etudes of Ligeti and all the five piano concertos of Hindemith. These recordings have won many awards including the Grand Prix de Disque Chopin in Poland, Diapason d’Or of the year in France and  sold nearly three million copies worldwide. All these recordings have  been released  in a box set of 130 CDs in 2018, distributed by Naxos worldwide.