Events

Standing before us is a young man aged 19, who plays the violin light-heartedly, calmly, boldly, but in a controlled way, with an unrivalled tone and bow stroke. Luka Ljubas is undoubtedly an exceptional talent... (Niederösterreichische Nachrichten, 2015)

 

SEONG-JIN CHO, Piano (South Korea)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op. 35

Frédéric Chopin: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.2 in F Minor, Op. 21

Luka Ljubas (1996) was born into a Croatian-Japanese family of musicians. He received his first music lessons from his mother and then continued to study with Arkadiy Vinokurov in Vienna, Brian Finlayson in Klagenfurt and Gerhard Schulz at Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He developed his skills further in master classes of eminent violin teachers, such as: So-Ock Kim, Pavel Vernikov, Eszter Haffner, Igor Ozim, Rodney Friend and Yuzuko Horigome. He has had numerous soloist appearances, in Vienna's Konzerthaus and on concert stages in Armenia, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Slovenia and Japan. He has been a soloist with the Carinthian Symphony and Chamber Orchestra, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the Artsakh Symphony Orchestra, the Schönbrunn Palace Orchestra, Academia Ars Musicae, the Padua and Veneto Orchestra and the Krems Chamber Orchestra. Austrian Radio gladly airs the recordings of his performances. He has won several prizes at international competitions and he attracted special attention by winning the 2017 Vaclav Huml International Violin Competition, at which he also won special prizes. In June 2017, he appeared at an open-air concert in Zagreb, with the Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maestro Eduard Strausser. He also works as a chamber musician and teacher. He is supported by Vienna's famous violin luthier Christine Erix, the Beare's International Violin Society from London and Andree König, thanks to whose mediation he received use of the 1783 violin by the renowned Turin luthier Giovanni Battista Guadagnini.

 

...this latest Chopin Competition winner can stand proud next to the likes of such illustrious past winners as Pollini, Argerich and Zimerman. (Pianist, 2016)

The young Korean pianist  Seong-Jin Cho(1994) started receiving music lessons aged six. At his first public appearance, when he was eleven years old, he proved to be an excellent musician. Before he moved to Paris in 2012 to study with Professor Michel Béroff at the Paris Conservatory of Music, he achieved great successes at international piano competitions: he won the 2008 International Frederic Chopin Competition for Young Pianists in Moscow and the 2009 Hamamatsu International Piano Competition and he won the third prize at the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. He won another third prize at the 2014 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv and then won the 17th International Frédéric Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2015, which skyrocketed him to the top of world pianism. The recording of his live performance at that competition, released by Deutsche Grammophon, topped the South Korean rank list and achieved triple platinum sales within only one week from its release. It has achieved nine-time platinum status until today. After that exceptional success, he had many appearances in world renowned concert halls, in Carnegie Hall and Concertgebouw Amsterdam among others. He also toured Japan, Taiwan, Europe and the United States of America and collaborated with the Warsaw and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie de Paris, conductor Tomáš Netopil, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Valery Gergiev, as well as the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra and Yuri Temirkanov. Seong-Jin Cho had also appeared with world's leading conductors and orchestras earlier: with Myung-Whun Chung, Lorin Maazel, Mikhail Pletnev, the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Mariinsky Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. His great deliberateness and expressive insight, musical maturity and refined playing always leave a strong impression on both the audiences and people from the profession, so that the observation by The Guardian that with Cho “it’s all about the music” is no surprise!