Alexandre Tharaud

French pianist Alexandre Tharaud maintains a broad catalog that reaches from Bach and Chopin forward to Thierry Pécou, a composer of his own generation. In 2012 he supplied performances of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert for the soundtrack of the Academy Award-winning film Amour and also appeared on camera in the role of himself.

Tharaud entered the world in Paris on December 12, 1968, into a household of performance artists. A grandfather played the violin, his mother taught dance at the Paris Opera, and his father sang in local operettas before taking up directing duties. His parents placed him at the piano at age five, and he entered the Conservatoire de Paris at age 14. By the close of the 1980s he had finished in the top three at multiple international piano contests, among them a second-place result at the Munich International Competition in 1989.

Playing a 1926 Steinway D Concert Grand, Tharaud committed Grieg: Lyric Pieces (Lyrische Stucke) to disc for Dante Productions in 1993. Two years later Madeleine Mihaud, widow of Darius, joined him as narrator on Milhaud: Piano Music. Additional 1990s projects encompassed music by Poulenc, Debussy, and Saint-Saëns, plus the complete piano works of Emmanuel Chabrier issued on the Arion label. More than a dozen albums followed in the 2000s, embracing Ravel and Satie alongside Schubert, Chopin, and twentieth-century figures such as Mauricio Kagel and Thierry Pécou. Tharaud gave the premiere of Pécou’s first concerto in Paris in 2006 and partnered with the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris on Thierry Pécou: L'Oiseau Innumérable, which appeared on Harmonia Mundi in 2008. During the same period he earned an international profile by juxtaposing Baroque, Romantic, and contemporary selections in recital and by devising programs that frequently incorporated a vocalist or narrator.

Director Michael Haneke placed Tharaud both on screen and on the soundtrack of his Oscar-, BAFTA-, and Golden Globe-winning film Amour, released in 2012; Virgin Classics issued the accompanying album in early 2013. Later piano recordings included Bach: Goldberg Variations in 2015 and Tharaud Plays Rachmaninov in 2016, the year the French government named him Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. Erato brought out his tribute to French singer Barbara in 2017, featuring duets with Juliette Binoche, Jane Birkin, and Vanessa Paradis among other vocalists; although already familiar on the French charts, the album marked his first appearance on the Swiss albums chart. That same year he published the memoir Montrez-moi vos mains. In 2020 several projects emerged: Complices with Jean-Guihen Queyras on Harmonia Mundi, an Erato collection of works by Gérard Pesson, Hans Abrahamsen, and Oscar Strasnoy, Chanson d’Amour with soprano Sophie Devieilhe, and a three-disc anthology of solo pieces that mixed earlier recordings with new material. Tharaud turned to film music for the 2022 release Cinema.