Dejan Lazić

Dejan Lazić, a pianist, conductor, and composer from Croatia, has earned recognition for his distinctive approach to piano literature. As a sought-after recording artist, he has contributed to more than twenty albums in roles ranging from accompanist and soloist to chamber-music partner. Born in Zagreb in 1977 into a musical household, he passed his early years in Salzburg and later enrolled at the Mozarteum, where his studies encompassed composition, clarinet, and piano. A viewing of Miloš Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus sparked his interest in writing music of his own. In 1991 he released his first recording, appearing both as clarinetist and pianist on the album Dejan Lazić & Zagreb Soloists play Mozart, and around the same period he began performing regularly with his longtime associates Benjamin Schmid, Zen Hu, Johannes Erkes, and Enrico Bronzi. Once his Mozarteum training was complete, Lazić embarked on an international touring schedule that included appearances with ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony, the NHK Symphony, and the Netherlands Philharmonic. Additional releases from those years comprise Sharon Bezaly’s Israeli Connection as well as the solo-piano discs Chopin Retrospection and Retrospection: W.A. Mozart, KV 1-574. During the 2000s he also established himself as a composer, placing his Istrian Dance for two violins on the album China Connection alongside Zen Hu and Ning Feng; he further documented his piano-concerto transcription of Brahms’ Violin Concerto No. 3, Op. 77 with both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. That decade brought him the 2009 ECHO Klassik Award for Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18. In the 2010s his catalog expanded to include new pieces for piano and orchestra along with cadenzas written for Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven concertos, and he issued recordings on the Channel Classics, Sony Classical, and Onyx Classics labels. The 2020 album Mozart: Piano Quartets in G minor K478 & E flat major K493; Rondo Concertante K333, made with Schmid, Hu, Erkes, and Bronzi, received the OPUS Klassik award the following year. In 2021 Lazić served as artist in residence with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester, and in 2022 he introduced his Kaleidoscope at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival in collaboration with Sol Gabetta, Andreas Ottensamer, and Zen Hu. Among his 2023 releases are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 23 & 14; Rondo Concertante (arr. Lazic) and Istrian Rhapsody, the latter containing first recordings of several of his original works.