Sophie Pacini

Born in 1991, Sophie Pacini started piano at the age of ten at the Salzburg Mozarteum, where she joined the Institute for Highly Talented Musicians in 2004. From 2007 she continued her studies with Pavel Gililov.

She has won numerous national and international competitions, including the Young Musicians Award in 2002 and 2005, and the Grotrian-Steinweg competition in Braunschweig in 2006. She was recently the youngest candidate to win the Austrian universities’ Great Scholarship Prize, founded by Hildegard Maschmann and endowed with 12,000 euros, as well as the Huebel Scholarship Prize of the Mozarteum University of Salzburg. In early 2011 she gave a recital at the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad and won the Edmond de Rothschild Group Award, which enabled her to record this CD.

These prizes have led to several major engagements, including the Deutschlandberger Klavierfrühling and the Lockenhaus Festival with Gidon Kremer. They have also led to concerts with orchestras in Warsaw, Pisa, Poznan ́ and at the Tiroler Festspiele, where she played Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, Chopin’s First Piano Concerto and Schumann’s Piano Concerto. She had previously toured Germany with the Bonn Classical Philharmonic Orchestra, playing Mozart’s Concerto K595. She was soloist at the Mozarteum in Bernstein’s Second Symphony conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

Sophie Pacini has played in all the most famous German concert halls: Die Glocke in Bremen, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, the Meistersingerhalle in Nuremberg, the Liederhalle in Stuttgart and the Herkulessaal in Munich, as well as the Konzerthaus at the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. In 2010, she gave recitals in the Gasteig – Cultural Centre – in Munich (at the Chopin Festival), in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Vienna (in the Lockenhaus and the Beethoven Festival 2010) and in Dresden.

In 2011 she will appear at the Gasteig in Munich, the Beethoven festival in Bonn and the International Cervo Music Festival, and she has also been invited by Martha Argerich to take part in the Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano.