Tour Dates: 5 Jun - 16 Jun, 2008

Jean Dubé

Born in France, 1981. He has played the piano from the age of five. As a soloist and chamber musician he appeared on television and radio in France and abroad. At the age of nine he was invited to open the Mozart Bicentenary, playing Mozart’s Concerto No.5 with the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra. In the same year he was unanimously awarded first prize in the ‘Jeunes Prodiges Mozart à Paris’ Competition.

Jean Dubé studied with Jacques Rouvier and Jacqueline Robin and followed masterclasses with Dimitri Bashkirov, Lev Naumov, Oxana Yablonskaja, Rudolf Buchbinder, Vladimir Krainev, Leslie Howard and Murray Perahia.

In 2000 he gained the Yvonne Lefébure Scholarship during the Orléans Twentieth Century International Piano Competition, enabling him to study in Dublin with John O’Conor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

Jean Dubé was the youngest graduate ever in the history of the Conservatory of Nice, and at the age of fourteen he gained the first prize in piano from the National Superior Conservatory of Paris. In international competitions he won first prize in the Francis Poulenc Competition in Brive-La-Gaillarde (1997) and the Jeunesses Musicales Competition in Bucharest (1998), and second prize in the Takasaki Art & Music Competition (2000). In December 2000 he was awarded the Second Grand Prize at the Olivier Messiaen Competition in Paris, where he also won the Yvonne Loriod Prize and the Editions Durand Prize.

In April 2002 Jean Dubé was the undisputed winner of the 6th edition of the prestigious International Franz Liszt Piano Competition of Utrecht. His delicate playing during the Final was also rewarded with the Audience Award. As part of the First Prize Jean Dubé has recorded a CD for the international record label Naxos (released in 2004), and performed up to one hundred concerts in no less than twenty-five different countries.

Besides many concerts in Europe, the international tour included engagements in Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Korea, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Namibia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Canada and the United States (with Barnabás Kelemen, the winner of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis).

Dubé's international tour includes some of the world's most important music festivals: Musical Olympus (St. Petersburg, Russia), Delft Chamber Music (The Netherlands), Wagner Festspiele (Bayreuth, Germany), Raritäten der Klaviermusik (Husum, Germany), Grachtenfestival (Amsterdam), Busoni Festival (Bolzano, Italy), Great Romantics (Hamilton, Canada),  Kuhmo Chamber Music (Finland), ‘K. Popova’ Laureate Days (Pleven, Bulgaria), Kyiv Music Fest (Ukraine), as well as the European Liszt Nights in Utrecht, Budapest and Weimar.

Orchestra performances include the St. Petersburg Symphony, the Netherlands Radio Symphony, the Györ Philharmonic, the Netherlands Philharmonic, the WDR Rundfunkorchester, the Ecuador National Symphony, the North Netherlands Orchestra, the Prague Chamber Symphony, the Pleven Philharmonic, the North Hungarian Symphony and the Johannesburg Philharmonic.

For 2003 Jean Dubé was selected for the prestigious Akzo Nobel for Young Talent project, performing in Göteborg with the Göteborg Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Hans Graf), in Budapest with the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra Matáv (conducted by András Ligeti) and in Birmingham with the London Philharmonic (conducted by Paul Daniel).

Next concert season Dubé will be giving concerts in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Finland, Macedonia, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Reviews

“With Jean Dubé one has the impression that this is the way, the only way, to play Liszt.”
- Hans-Joachim Bauer, Bayreuth