Paavali Jumppanen / Piano

“a rare wedding of intellectual penetration, coloristic imagination, and sheer virtuoso firepower.”
Boston Globe

“Jumppanen's playing is fresh and bracing, like a cool Artic breeze blowing the cobwebs away from musty concert halls”
Adelaide Advertiser

Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen has become known as an exciting and a versatile performer, who is equally at home on stage as a soloist and a chamber musician. His vast repertoire spans much of the classical piano literature, from Bach to the Avant-garde. In recent years, Jumppanen has dedicated much of his time into performing cycles of the complete Beethoven Sonatas. The performances have sparked enthusiastic reviews such as “the perfect balance of Beehtoven’s late Sonatas” and “the sheer, overflowing energy of his musicianship held one’s attention throughout this impressive performance and the result was a bracing and enjoyable
reminder of how path-breaking Beethoven’s music was” by the Boston Globe.
Photo credit Riikka Koikkalainen

Jumppanen’s interest in the Viennese Classical period has also led to the fabled recoding of the complete Violin Sonatas by Beethoven with violinist Corey Cerovsek, which won the Midem Prize for the Best Chamber Music Recording of 2007. This current season, Jumppanen will also be performing the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas at the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston as well as in four different cities in his home country Finland.

Mr. Jumppanen studied at the Sibelius-Academy in Finland, and at the Music Academy of Basel in Switzerland as a student of Krystian Zimerman. He completed diplomas in both institutions with the highest possible awards.

In 2005, Deutsche Grammophon released Jumppanen’s recording of the complete Piano Sonatas of Pierre Boulez, which received prizes in France and Germany and earned the praise of The Guardian, which referred to it as “the best recorded disc of Boulez’s piano music so far.” Having worked with Pierre Boulez himself, Jumppanen has become a celebrated advocate of Boulez’s music.

Jumppanens’s New York debut in 2001 at the 92nd Street Y, presented by Young Concert Artists, garnered reviews such as “fresh and exciting playing” and “immense power and an extraordinary range of colors” by the New York Times. Since then, Jumppanen has toured extensively in the US as well as the prominent concert halls of Europe. He has toured Australia as a soloist of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and performed with many of the most prominent European orchestras, such as the Oslo Philharmonic. Jumppanen has repeatedly collaborated with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London, most recently in the spring 2010, when he performed the Grieg Piano Concerto under Jiri Belohlavek.