Can Çakmur

The career of pianist Can Çakmur advanced swiftly, yielding an extensive recorded body of work by the time he reached his mid-twenties. Several prominent awards from the closing years of the 2010s helped establish his standing.

Born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1997, Çakmur (who supplies the pronunciation “Djahn Tchakmur”) grew up in a household that, though free of professional musicians, maintained a lively interest in music and actively supported his development. Initial training took place in Turkey under Leyla Bekensir and Ayşe Kaptan, after which he continued with Jun Kanno and Emre Şen. Following secondary education in Ankara, he relocated to the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he studied with Marcella Crudeli and received his diploma in 2014, graduating with highest honors. Further instruction came from Grigory Gruzman at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar and from Diane Anderson in private lessons, complemented by master classes with assorted additional teachers. Competitive success followed: first prize at the Scottish International Piano Competition in 2017 and both solo and chamber-music first prizes at the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in 2018. The BIS label subsequently signed him, issuing a disc drawn from his Hamamatsu Festival appearances in 2019; a recording of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s Schwanengesang song cycle appeared on the same imprint the next year.

He has performed at such prominent halls as London’s Wigmore Hall, Glasgow Concert Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, where he gave the Japanese premiere of Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. Appearances at Turkey’s leading concert venues and festivals have been frequent, while broadcasts have reached listeners across Europe, Japan, and Turkey. In 2022 Çakmur issued the album Without Borders, devoted to Bartók and additional composers. Subsequent releases have centered on his “Schubert +” series, juxtaposing Schubert’s music with works by those he influenced; the installment Schubert + Brahms was released by BIS in 2024. An avid chamber-music participant, he intends to record Beethoven’s cello sonatas with Alexandre Castro-Balbi. Beyond performance, Çakmur is sought after as a writer and lecturer; more than fifty articles by him have appeared in the Turkish classical-music journal Andante.