Charles Richard-Hamelin

Sunday, April 12, 2026 – 3 :00 PM

Mairs Concert Hall, Macalester College

“Charles Richard-Hamelin is already a national treasure.” 
— Le Devoir, Montreal

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Program

DEBUSSY
Suite Bergamasque

RAVEL
Sonatine

POULENC
Suite Napoli

CHOPIN
4 Scherzi

Silver medalist and winner of the Krystian Zimerman Prize for the best sonata performance at the 2015 International Chopin Piano Competition, Quebec native Charles Richard-Hamelin is an important pianist of his generation. Recipient of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec and of the prestigious Career Development Award conferred by the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto, he also holds the Prix Denise-Pelletier in November 2022, becoming the youngest recipient in the history of that highly distinguished prize.

Richard-Hamelin has been invited to many major festivals such as La Roque d’Anthéron and the Nohant Festival in France, Prague Spring Festival, Chopin and his Europe Festival in Warsaw, Lanaudière Festival and George Enescu Festival in Bucarest. As soloist, he has performed with many ensembles, including virtually all the major Canadian symphony orchestras (Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Metropolitan, Quebec City, Edmonton, Calgary), as well as the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Korean Symphony Orchestra, OFUNAM (Mexico), Les Violons du Roy and I Musici de Montréal. He has worked with such renowned conductors as Kent Nagano, Rafael Payare, Bernard Labadie, Antoni Wit, Vasily Petrenko, Jacek Kaspszyk, Aziz Shokhakimov, Peter Oundjian, Jacques Lacombe, Fabien Gabel, Carlo Rizzi, John Storgårds, Alexander Prior, Giancarlo Guerrero, Christoph Campestrini, Lan Shui, Otto Tausk, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, Kazuki Yamada, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Jonathan Cohen. Charles Richard-Hamelin is also active as a chamber musician. He has performed with Andrew Wan, James Ehnes, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Marc-André Hamelin, the Dover Quartet, the New Orford Quartet, the Apollon Musagète Quartet and the Meccore Quartet, among others. A 2011 graduate of McGill University, the Yale School of Music, and the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, he studied with Paul Surdulescu, Sara Laimon, Boris Berman, André Laplante and Jean Saulnier.

His first solo CD, featuring late works by Chopin, was released by Analekta label in 2015, and was named by CBC Music among the 10 Best releases of the year. His discography since includes more solo Chopin, plus Chopin and Mozart concertos, chamber works of Beethoven and Schumann, and Échos, a CD of Chopin, Granados and Albéniz.

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“Charles Richard-Hamelin interprets these works at the highest pianistic level, with great joy in playing and a great sense for the individual characters of the pieces.”

— ondomagazin.de (Deutschland)

“[The pianist] is masterful. He has a way of singing that is quite extraordinary; all his phrase endings are extremely meticulous. Every little rhythmic cell, every theme is inhabited, embodied […].”

— La Tribune, France Musique

“…Richard-Hamelin marked his first entry during the opening Maestoso, immediately displaying his sensitive artistry with every note carefully placed, every chord artfully voiced, with a flexible rubato the hallmark of the composer’s style. […] An enthusiastic standing ovation with three curtain calls.”

— Winnipeg Free Press

“The young pianist’s strength, splendour and sense for emphasis were equally captivating as his enormous ability to convey dream, poetry and longing.”

— Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (Deutschland)

“Charles Richard-Hamelin is clearly a musician-pianist: fluent, multi-faceted and tonally seductive […] Melodic inflection is curvaceous, natural and discreetly sensuous.”

— Jeremy Siepmann, BBC Music Magazine

“Richard-Hamelin has bold, original ideas about the music he plays, the emotional reservoirs to back them up and the technical equipment to convey them without distraction.”

— Gramophone Magazine, London (UK)

“If there is one defining characteristic of Richard-Hamelin’s playing it’s how he wields the tools of musical rhetoric – stretching time by slightly slowing down and speeding up, and playing with the silences between notes – to ensure that the narrative tension never goes out of the piece he is playing.”

— Star, Toronto