Pierre Hantaï

Pierre Hantaï was born into a family of artists. During his childhood, he was passionately attracted to painting, but it was his encounter with the music of Bach that was to determine his future path. The harpsichord recordings of Gustav Leonhardt had a profound influence on him in this respect.

He took his first steps in music at the age of ten, playing chamber music with his brothers. At first, he explored the repertory that interested him by himself (on a small spinet), before taking formal lessons with the American harpsichordist Arthur Haas. Ultimately, he was invited by Gustav Leonhardt to attend his classes in Amsterdam for two years. He was still very young when he began performing with the key personalities of the small world of early music, including the Kuijken brothers, Gustav Leonhardt, Philippe Herreweghe and Jordi Savall.

At that time, together with his brothers and friends, including Hugo Reyne, Sébastien Marq, Marc Minkowski, François Fernandez, Ageet Zweistra and Philippe Pierlot, he founded Lous Landes Consort, awarded the first prize at a chamber music competition in Bruges, and Concert Français; with time, the latter evolved into a chamber orchestra.

He became known to a wider audience with his recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a work that he has since played over a hundred times throughout the world. He has often performed and recorded the Elizabethan repertory (Bull, Byrd, Farnaby), as well as Bach and Couperin, and has devoted himself to an in-depth exploration of the works of Domenico Scarlatti, of which he has made numerous recordings and with which he seeks to familiarise audiences. Today he enjoys appearing with his musical friends on the concert platform, among them Jordi Savall, his brothers Marc and Jérôme Hantaï, the recorder player Hugo Reyne, the violinist Amandine Beyer, and the harpsichordists Skip Sempé, Olivier Fortin, Aapo Häkkinen and Maude Gratton.

He receives many invitations to conduct chamber orchestras and give master classes all over the world, however he is most well-known for his recitals. His concert engagements for the upcoming year include France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Estonia, Japan, China and Taiwan.

When he enters the stage, in the first place, he strives to retrieve what has always been present in intertwining different musical cultures, and what we, in artist’s opinion, have lost in the contemporary music education system and the “classical music” performances: the bond between people and the joy of the unexpected discoveries we make while playing and hearing the music – both as the performers and the listeners.