“To say that Mr. Lifschitz made his playing look easy would not be quite accurate. What he offered was a performance of such poetry that the question of whether executing it was difficult hardly came to mind.”
The New York Times
“Lifschitz maximised the instrument’s potential for colour and tonal variety…the gentle, unshowy authority of his stage manner, that he was most persuasive, emphasising the work’s qualities as living music as opposed to historic monument.”
The Guardian
Konstantin Lifschitz has earned a reputation for performing demanding masterpieces and extraordinary feats of endurance with great honesty and exceptional, persuasive beauty. He appears in the world’s most prestigious concert halls and with the outstanding orchestras, both in recitals and concert programs. In addition, he has recorded numerous CDs. His performances are praised as “magical moments” and “deeply satisfying” (The Independent), as well as “with movingly natural expression” (The New York Times).
Konstantin Lifschitz was born in 1976 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. At the age of five, he began piano lessons at the Gnessin Music School in Moscow. Tatiana Zelikman was his most important teacher. After graduating, he continued his studies in the UK and Italy where his other teachers included Alfred Brendel, Leon Fleisher, Theodor Gutmann, Hamish Milne, Charles Rosen, Karl-Ulrich Schnabel, Vladimir Tropp, Fou T’song, and Rosalyn Tureck, mostly at the Lieven International Piano Foundation.
In the early 1990s, Konstantin Lifschitz received a grant from the Russian Cultural Foundation. Around that time, he started to perform in European capitals such as Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Munich, and Milan. He toured Japan with the Moscow Virtuosi under the baton of Vladimir Spivakov, while in Europe he toured with the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov, and also performed with Mischa Maisky and Gidon Kremer in many European cites. In 1995 he received the ECHO Klassik Award of “The Best Emerging Artist of the Year” for his first recording, and the following year he was nominated for a Grammy award for Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
Since his sensational debut recital in the October Hall of the House of Unions in Moscow at the age of 13, Konstantin Lifschitz performs solo recitals at major festivals and the most important concert venues worldwide and appears with leading international orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, NDR Symphony Orchestra Hamburg, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, SWR Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, RAI National Symphony Orchestra or Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
As a soloist Konstantin Lifschitz has collaborated with leading conductors such as Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Spivakov, Yury Temirkanov, Sir Neville Marriner, Bernard Haitink, Sir Roger Norrington, Fabio Luisi, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Marek Janowski, Eliahu Inbal, Mikhail Jurowsky, Andrey Boreyko, Dimitry Liss, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Alexander Rudin and Christopher Hogwood.
As a chamber musician, Konstantin Lifschitz has performed with artists such as Gidon Kremer, Maxim Vengerov, Vadim Repin, Misha Maisky, Mstislav Rostropovich, Natalia Gutman, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Lynn Harrell, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Daishin Kashimoto, Leila Josefowicz, Carolin und Jörg Widmann, Sol Gabetta, Eugene Ugorski, Alexander Knyazev and Alexander Rudin.
Highlights of the recent seasons included a solo recital in the Grand Hall of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, invitations to give piano recitals at the Tchaikovsky Hall and the “Zaryadye” in Moscow, a Bach cycle in Kaohsiung and Taipei with a total of nine concerts, and a “Play and Conduct” concert with the Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra. He has also appeared at numerous festivals, including VERÃO CLÁSSICO, the Les Nuits Pianistiques Festival in Aix-en-Provence, and the Würzburg Bach Days.
Konstantin Lifschitz has increasingly appeared as a conductor. He has conducted ensembles and orchestras such as the Moscow Virtuosi, the Century Orchestra Osaka, the Solisti Di Napoli, the Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra Wernigerode, the St. Christopher Chamber Orchestra Vilnius, the Moscow Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra, the Lux Aeterna Ensemble and the Gabriel Choir Budapest, the Dalarna Sinfonietta Falun, and the Arpeggione Chamber Orchestra Hohenems. Conducting from the piano, he has recorded Bach’s seven harpsichord concertos with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, which led to another European tour. In 2019, he successfully conducted the China tour of the Lucerne Chamber Philharmonic, which he founded and artistically directed.
As a prolific recording artist, he has been releasing numerous CDs and DVDs, many of which have received exceptional reviews. Amongst them are 8 recordings for the Orfeo label including Bach’s Musical Offering, the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue and Three Frescobaldi Toccatas (2007), Gottfried von Einem Piano Concerto with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra (2009), Brahms Second Concerto and Mozart Concerto K. 456 under Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (2010), Bach The Art of Fugue (2010), the complete Bach Concertos for keyboard and orchestra with the Stuttgart Kammerorchester (2011), Goldberg Variations (2015) and “Saisons Russes” with works of Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky and Jakoulov (2016). In 2008, a live recording of Lifschitz’s performance of Bach Well-Tempered Clavier (Books I and II) at the Miami International Piano Festival was released on DVD by VAI. In 2014, Beethoven’s complete violin Sonatas with Daishin Kashimoto was released by Warner Classics. In 2020 to celebrate the composer’s 250 years jubilee Lifschitz released CD and Vinyl Box of Beethoven’s Complete 32 Piano Sonatas with Alpha Classics (Live recordings). His most recent CD release, dedicated to Bach and Peter Seabourne’s toccatas, came out in 2022, and digitally, his latest Bach recording accompanies and illustrates his Bach Wanderbook (Book of Hours, Days, and Seasons with J.S. Bach).
Konstantin Lifschitz is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London and has taught his own class as artistic professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 2008.