yannick rafalimanana

French pianist Yannick Rafalimanana has developed an international concert career as a recitalist and chamber musician. Recent performances have taken him to halls all over the world, including the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Köln Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Chamber Hall, and the Kennedy Center in Washington. He has made chamber music with countless artists, including Kim Kashkashian, Steven Isserlis, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Arnold Steinhardt, and Itzhak Perlman.

 As a soloist, he has appeared with the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, the Orchestre CNR de Lille, Orchestre Impromptu, the Ensemble Parisien. He has worked under the batons of Péter Eötvös, Maxime Pascal, Jean Deroyer, Lucie Leguay and Zolt Nagy. Yannick regularly appears at a wide variety of summer festivals, including the Perlman Music Program, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival,  Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Osterfestspiele Baden-Baden, Sommerliche Hitzacker Musiktage , OCM Prussia Cove and Krzyzowa-Musik Festival.

Yannick is the winner of numerous awards and prizes, including the Borromeo Quartet Guest Artist Award, the Bruxelles J-Musiciens Competition, the Brest Piano Competition, and the International Ravel Academy's Rotary-Lions Competition. As the first prize winner of the 2012 Tufts/New England Conservatory Soloist Competition, he made his U.S. concerto debut in Symphony Hall in Boston, playing the Schumann Concerto with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Keith Lockhart. 

 Born in Lille, he began his musical studies at the Conservatory of Lille under the tutelage of Alain Raes. He later graduated from the Paris Conservatoire with first prizes in piano performance, chamber music, and collaborative piano performance. His teachers there included Bruno Rigutto, Michael Levinas, and Jean-Claude Pennetier. His chamber music and collaborative piano coaches included Francois Salque, Michel Moraguais, David Walter and Jean Koerner. Yannick then moved to Boston, where he obtained a graduate diploma from the New England Conservatory in piano performance and a master of music in chamber music as a student of Vivian Weilerstein.

Yannick has been teaching Chamber Music at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen from 2015-2018.

 In 2022, he launched a concert series in his neighborhood in Berlin called “Yannick’s Salon” bringing Chamber Music masterpieces to the local audience of Weissensee.