Ten years later, a déjà-vu: Lorenzo Soulès emerged as the winner of the 2022 Concours International de Piano d’Orléans and simultaneously received the student prize from the Conservatoire d’Orléans, the audience prize, and the Edison Denisov Prize. He is also successful as a concert pianist, including at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr. Despite his young age, he has been a regular guest at the festival for many years, particularly closely associated with its Education program, in which he first got involved in 2011. But it is not just since his intensive collaboration with the Klavier-Festival Ruhr that Lorenzo Soulès has made a name for himself in western Germany: After completing his piano studies at the Paris Conservatoire – at the age of 13 and with top grades – he began his studies with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne in 2006. It goes without saying that this education helped him become an outstanding interpreter of Messiaen, as well as the fact that Pierre-Laurent Aimard selected Lorenzo Soulès for his major Messiaen project at this year’s Klavier-Festival Ruhr.

Photo: Sihoo Kim