Louis Lortie began piano lessons at the École de Musique Wilfred-Pelletier in Montreal, eventually studying with Yvonne Hubert, a pupil of Cortot, at the École Normale de Musique. From 1968 Lortie entered piano competitions and at thirteen he won the Montreal Symphony Prize and with it, his debut with the orchestra. In 1973 and 1975 Lortie won prizes at the Concerto Praga organised by Czech radio; he also received prizes at the CBC National Talent Competition and the Canadian Music Competitions’ International Stepping Stones contest and was all the while broadcasting and giving recitals.

In 1975 Lortie went to Vienna to study with Beethoven specialist Dieter Weber; but finding upon his arrival that Weber was too ill to teach, he enrolled instead at Indiana University, studying piano with Menahem Pressler. However, after three months Lortie left: he was unsatisfied with the teaching, and apparently learnt far more from Leon Fleisher with whom he had some lessons in his early twenties.

In 1978 Lortie toured Japan and China with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, making his adult debut with them in Montreal before the start of the tour. After winning the Busoni International Piano Competition in Bolzano and gaining fourth place at the Leeds International Piano Competition, both in 1984, Lortie’s career began to accelerate. The following year was a busy one for Lortie: he made his debut in America in April, and his orchestral and recital debuts in London in November. For these recital debuts, he played Chopin’s complete études of which the Musical Times wrote, ‘It was a display of bravura tempered by delicacy, passion and sensibility, of the kind for which Chopin the pianist was himself renowned.’ Two years later Lortie gave his recital debut in New York and during the same year performed the complete solo piano works of Ravel for the BBC and CBC. In 1989 Lortie received rave notices for a recital in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw where he played Liszt, Stravinsky and Ravel: ‘Never in the history of this venue have we seen playing with such pleasure and impeccable style’ (Trouw). The 2002–2003 season saw Lortie making his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, replacing an indisposed Maurizio Pollini. His performance of the complete Chopin études was a great success, as was the following tour of North America. In Autumn 2003 Lortie opened the Bonn Beethoven Festival with a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major Op. 58, whilst with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra he will perform a cycle of Mozart’s complete piano concertos culminating in 2006, the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Lortie has played with many of the North American orchestras and those in Britain.

Lortie’s repertoire is based on the Romantic era, mainly Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and Ravel. He has also performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in London, Toronto, Berlin and Milan. Of his Berlin performances Die Welt wrote that it was ‘…possibly the most beautiful Beethoven since the times of Wilhelm Kempff’. With the Montreal Symphony Orchestra Lortie has performed and conducted all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos.

Lortie is a player of intelligence and finesse with a technique that can accommodate technically demanding works. His main recordings are on the Chandos label. For this British label he has recorded around thirty discs, which include amongst other things the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, Chopin’s complete études, and the complete works of Ravel including the piano concertos. Although The Gramophone magazine found Lortie’s Gaspard de la nuit of Ravel no more than ‘commendable’, Lortie achieves a great deal in his recording of this work. It is gratifying to hear the sharp crescendo ‘hairpins’ over the main melody of Scarbo, and his clarity of detail is certainly a bonus. Lortie’s recording of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations Op. 35 won him the Edison Award, whilst three compact discs of Liszt’s complete works for piano and orchestra contain many rarely-recorded works. In Liszt, Lortie seems rather afraid to throw himself into a work such as the ‘Dante’ Sonata, his careful tempi and controlled passion making one think that he is not temperamentally suited to such rhetorical and declamatory music. As one reviewer wrote in The Gramophone, ‘But I still have the feeling that this distinguished French-Canadian artist is perhaps more temperamentally attuned to the half-Gallic Chopin than to Liszt.’ He is certainly more suited to the intimate world of Schumann, and delivers a fine recording of Bunte Blätter Op. 99, coupled with Brahms’s Variations on a theme by Schumann Op.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).