Ralf Gothóni

The Finnish pianist, conductor, composer, and pedagogue Ralf Gothóni has a multifaceted international career. His busy concert schedule includes major festivals (Berlin, Edinburgh, Salzburg, La Roque d’Anthéron, Prades, Prague, The Proms, Ravinia, Seoul, etc.), orchestras (Bayerischer Rundfunk, Berlin and Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestras, Detroit, Chicago and Toronto Symphony Orchestras, etc.) and recording studios with more than 100 recordings. With the Korean Chamber Orchestra, he has just concluded a huge Mozart project in Seoul, performing and recording his 46 symphonies. In his youth, Gothóni performed all of Schubert’s songs with 38 singers in 15 extensive concerts, and in the 1990s, he presented Haydn’s 16 keyboard concertos with the Tapiola Sinfonietta over a weekend.
Since 2007, when arthritis ended his recital career, Gothóni has performed regularly as a soloist and conductor, often conducting from the keyboard. He has premiered more than a dozen piano concertos (Tavener, Sallinen, Rautavaara, Curtis-Smith, etc.) and as a conductor he has worked, among others, as principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra between 2001-2010 and as musical director of the Northwest Chamber Orchestra of Seattle. As a chamber musician, he performs regularly at major festivals.
Gothóni has been a professor of chamber music at 7 European universities, including Madrid, Hamburg and Berlin. He also gives master classes all over the world and is invited to be part of the jury in the most important piano competitions.
His repertoire as a composer includes concertos, a full opera, three chamber operas, chamber music and songs.
In the 1980s, during Gothóni’s artistic direction, the Savonlinna Opera Festival grew to its current format. In the 1990s he was the initiator and artistic director of the “Forbidden City Music Festival” in Beijing and between 2007-2021 he directed “Musical Bridges” between Cairo, Alexandria, Baku, Izmir, Amman, Shanghai and the Savonlinna International Music Academy, of which he is Artistic President. He has also successfully written three books with essays on musical phenomenology.
Gothóni has received numerous awards, including the American Gilmore Artist Award, the Order “Pro Finlandia” and the Schubert Medal from the Austrian Ministry of Culture. In 2012 he was honored in Madrid for his artistic and pedagogical activities by Her Majesty Queen Sofia. In 2019 Gothóni was awarded the title Doctor Honoris Causa by the Estonian Academy of Arts and in 2022 the Guildhall School of Music in London appointed him the “International Chair of Chamber Music for Keyboard”.