Dang Thai Son

One of the foremost musicians of our times, the Vietnamese pianist Dang Thai Son became the first Asian to win first prize in the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (1980). Born in Hanoi, he began learning piano at the age of five with his mother, before continuing his musical education with Vladimir Natanson and Dmitri Bashkirov at the Pyotr Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.

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He has performed in more than 40 countries, appearing with the most outstanding orchestras, including the Philharmonia Orchestra, philharmonic orchestras of St Petersburg, Prague and Warsaw, Orchestra Nationale de Paris, Berlin Staatskapelle, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and NHK Symphony. He is a professor of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and many of his students have won prizes in the world’s biggest music competitions. He has also sat on the jury of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the competitions in Hamamatsu, Cleveland and Sydney, the Clara Haskil (Switzerland), Artur Rubinstein (Israel) and Ferruccio Busoni (Italy).

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In 2003 the Yamaha Music Media Corporation published a biography entitled A Pianist Loved by Chopin: The Dang Thai Son Story. He is a laureate of the Prix Opus, in Quebec, Canada, in the Concert of the Year category (2016). He has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Melodya, Victor JVC and the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, which has released several of his discs, including Chopin’s nocturnes (on historical and modern piano) and concertos (with the Orchestra of the 18th Century and Frans Brüggen, Platinum Disc), and also a Paderewski disc featuring a selection of solo works and the Piano Concerto in A minor, recorded at the ‘Chopin and his Europe’ festival in 2015 (Philharmonia Orchestra, cond. Vladimir Ashkenazy). That recording won ResMusica magazine’s La clef du mois award. In 2018 he was decorated by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage with the ‘Gloria Artis’ gold medal for his services to culture.