Lucas Debargue

Lucas Debargue was born in France in 1990 and found classical music at ten. He kept playing alongside advanced studies in literature and philosophy, and only committed to the instrument entirely after meeting the teacher Rena Shereshevskaya in 2011; he entered her interpretation class at the École Normale de Musique de Paris the following year.

In 2015 he took fourth prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, along with the special prize of the Moscow Music Critics’ Association, given for the freedom and beauty of his playing rather than for where the jury placed him. Sony Classical signed him the same year.

He has since played Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw, the Musikverein, the Philharmonie in Berlin and Suntory Hall, and appears as a permanent guest artist with Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica. He has recorded eight albums for Sony Classical: Scarlatti, Chopin, Liszt and Ravel; Bach, Beethoven and Medtner; Schubert and Szymanowski; Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time; the four-volume set of fifty-two Scarlatti sonatas finished in 2019; the music of Miłosz Magin with Kremerata Baltica; the complete solo piano music of Fauré in 2024; and Gershwin Variations, released this September.

He also composes — more than twenty works for piano and for chamber ensemble, including a concertino premiered by Kremerata Baltica and a piano trio commissioned by the Fondation Louis Vuitton. He says the writing draws as much on literature, painting, jazz and cinema as on music.