23rd
València
Iturbi
International
Piano
Competition
From 4 to June 14, 2025
Janina Fialkowska
For 50 years, concert pianist Janina Fialkowska has enchanted audiences and critics around the world. She has been praised for her musical integrity, her refreshing natural approach and her unique piano sound thus becoming “one of the Grandes Dames of piano playing” (Frankfurter Allgemeine).
Born in Canada, she began her piano studies with her mother at age 4 continuing in her native Montreal with Yvonne Hubert. In Paris she studied with Yvonne Lefébure and in New York at the Juilliard School with Sascha Gorodnitzki, experiencing the best of both French and Russian piano traditions. Her career was launched in 1974, when the legendary Arthur Rubinstein became her mentor after her prize-winning performance at his inaugural Master Piano Competition, calling her a “born Chopin interpreter” laying the foundation for her lifelong identification with this composer.
Since then she has performed with the foremost orchestras worldwide under the baton of such conductors as, Bernard Haitink, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Georg Solti, and of the your generation conductors such as Klaus Mäkelä and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. She has won special recognition for a series of important premieres, notably Liszt’s newly discovered Third Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony and several contemporary piano concertos. Ms Fialkowska’s discography includes many award-winning discs, e.g. the BBC Music Magazine’s 2013 “Instrumental CD of the Year” award as well as the Canadian “Juno Award” in 2018.
Her native Canada has bestowed upon her their highest honors: “Officer of the Order of Canada”, the “Governor General’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award in Classical Music” (Canada’s equivalent to the US Kennedy Centre Awards), as well as three honorary doctorates. She passes on her wide musical experience in master classes and at her annual “International Piano Academy” in Bavaria, where she now resides and makes frequent appearances as a juror of the world’s most prestigious piano competitions.
Recent highlights of her performing career include festival appearances at the Klavierfestival Ruhr, the Berlin Piano Festival and the Klavierfruehling Deutschlandsberg among others in Germany and Austria, as well as concerts in England, Northen Ireland and Wales, in Croatia and her annual tours of Canada and the US. Upcoming concerts include a recital at London’s Cadogan Hall, a recital and master class in Tbilisi, Georgia, as well as summer festival appearances in Germany, Canada and the US.
In October 2021 her autobiography, A Note in Time, was published to universal acclaim by Novum Publishers in London. It is now available worldwide as hard cover and e-reader. (“Mesmerizing memoir”- “A totally absorbing read” – “A volume to savour and treasure”).
