Francesco Tristano

A native of Luxembourg with Italian roots, Francesco Tristano Schlimé was born on 16 September 1981 in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

A graduate of the famous Julliard School in New York, he began his career as a pianist at the Russian National Orchestra in 2000, before moving into performance and composition. Trained in the baroque and specialising in the repertoire of Johann Sebastian Bach, in 2001 he founded the New Bach Players Ensemble and recorded all of the Leipzig maestro’s concertos for the harpsichord, as well as his famous ‘Variations Goldberg’ (Goldberg Variations) and ‘Suites françaises’ (French Suites).

An adventurous musician, Francesco Tristano did not stop there. Building bridges between baroque, contemporary and electro styles, he has released a series of ambitious and disconcerting albums under his own name. After a selection of ‘Oeuvres pour Piano’ (Music for Piano) by Luciano Berio in 2005 (Sisyphe), Schlimé was invited to join the label Infiné, which has released his various collections; ‘Strings of Life’ (2006) and ‘Auricle/Bio On’ (2008) are just some of his cross-genre, accessible works.

Released in 2007, ‘Not For Piano’ is actually a suite of excerpts only for the piano, from which the EP ‘The Melody’ was taken with its variations. That same year he released his interpretation of the First Book of Frescobaldi’s Toccatas. Encouraged by the European Concert Hall, who chose him from among the rising stars from Carnegie Hall in New York, and having been made laureate at the Concours International du Piano XXe Siècle in Orléans, Tristano Schlimé joined up with Carl Craig (for ‘Sessions’ in 2008) before embarking on a new adventure in 2009 with the group Aufgang (and his partner Rami Khalifé), whose first album featured a lovely combination of electro-jazz. In 2010, Schlimé prolonged his exploration of the field of electro with Carl Craig for ‘Idiosynkrasia’.

Four years later, along with his German counterpart Alice Sara Ott, the pianist recorded the recital ‘Scandale’, comprising pieces played with four hands. The September 2014 album revisits such transcriptions for piano as ‘Le Rite du printemps’ (The Rite of Spring) by Stravinsky, ‘Scheherazade’ by Rimski-Korsakov and Ravel’s ‘La Valse’ (The Waltz). It also features a new composition for the piano by Schlimé, called ‘A Soft Shell Groove’.