Béatrice Berrut, a pianist celebrated for unconventional recital programs that at times feature her transcriptions of orchestral scores, has performed in leading halls across Europe and the Americas.
Born in 1985 and raised in Switzerland’s Valais canton amid the Alps, Berrut learned to ski at age two and has never lost her enthusiasm for the sport. Hearing her mother play at home prompted her own start on the piano at eight; she developed an early passion for Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, and has long been drawn to Liszt, picturing him during his Swiss sojourns. As a developing artist she absorbed Heinrich Neuhaus’s treatise The Art of Piano Playing, whose advocacy of an “orchestral” piano technique has guided both her interpretive outlook and her programming choices.
Already accomplished at sixteen, she began lessons with Esther Yellin in Zurich. In 2002 she became Swiss laureate of the Concours Eurovision for young musicians, after which violinist Gidon Kremer engaged her for the Basel Festival. Further study followed with Galina Iwanzowa in Berlin; both Yellin and Iwanzowa had been pupils of Neuhaus. Berrut completed an artist’s diploma at the Royal Irish Academy of Music under John O’Conor. Her first recording appeared in 2003 on the Accord label, a recital devoted to Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt.
She has since given recitals in such venues as the Musikverein in Vienna, the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Tianjin Grand Theatre in China, and Preston Bradley Hall in Chicago. Her programs frequently incorporate her own transcriptions of orchestral works. Chamber-music partnerships have placed her alongside Kremer, Itzhak Perlman, violinist Shlomo Mintz, and cellist Frans Helmerson. As concerto soloist she has appeared with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire in France, the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland, and the Dortmund Philharmonic in Germany. During the 2010s and 2020s Berrut has recorded for the Centaur, Fuga Libera, Aparte, and La Dolce Volta labels; on the last of these she released Jugendstil, containing her transcriptions and paraphrases of Mahler and Schoenberg, in 2022.
