Gabriela Montero

The 2025/26 season sees Montero as Artist-in-Residence at London’s acclaimed Barbican Centre, which will feature the UK premiere of her piano quintet Canaima with the Calidore String Quartet, her debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and a new solo recital programme, Iberia, showcasing Spain’s rich influence on the piano repertoire through works by Albéniz, Granados, Alicia de Larrocha, Scarlatti, and others. This follows previous residencies with the Sao Paolo Symphony, Prague Radio Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, Basel Symphony, and at the Rheingau Festival. 

Montero’s other recent and forthcoming highlights include debuts with Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, and Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin; extensive tours with the City of Birmingham and Prague symphonies; duo performances with Martha Argerich at Munich’s Isarphilharmonie and Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum; and performances of her own “Latin Concerto” with the San Francisco and Dallas symphonies (Marin Alsop), New World Symphony (Stéphane Denève), Vienna and Polish National radio symphonies (Marin Alsop), BBC Scottish and Antwerp symphonies (Elim Chan), Swedish Radio Symphony (Marta Gardolińska), and National Arts Centre Orchestra (Alexander Shelley), where she concludes a four-year Creative Partnership in 2025. In the same year, Montero was commissioned as a jury member by the 17th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition to compose a new work for all 30 competitors, entitled Rachtime, a piece that pays tribute to Van Cliburn’s golden pianism and enduring place in the American cultural pantheon. 

Montero has appeared with many of the world’s leading orchestras, among them the New York and Boston Philharmonics, the Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Houston, Atlanta, Toronto and Baltimore symphonies, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras in North America; in Europe, with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, NDR Sinfonieorchester Hamburg, NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, and Zurich Chamber Orchestra – plus the Royal Liverpool, Rotterdam, Dresden, and Netherlands Radio Philharmonic orchestras, and the Lucerne, Barcelona and Vienna symphonies; and in Asia and Australasia with the Yomiuri Nippon, Sydney and New Zealand symphonies. 

A graduate and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London, Montero is also a frequent recitalist, having given concerts at such distinguished venues worldwide as the Wigmore Hall, Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Vienna Konzerthaus, Berlin Philharmonie, Frankfurt Alte Oper, Cologne Philharmonie, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Sydney Opera House, New York’s 92nd Street Y, Paris’ Philharmonie and La Seine Musicale, Seoul’s LG Arts Centre, Hong Kong City Hall, the National Concert Hall in Taipei; and at leading festivals in Edinburgh, Salzburg, Milan, Lucerne, Chicago (Ravinia), Gstaad, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, and Ruhr. In June 2025, Montero was invited, as one of a handful of the world’s most celebrated pianists, to perform at the “Harmonies of Hope” concert at the Piazza Pio XII in Vatican City, which included a private audience with Pope Leo XIV. Montero also maintains an ongoing artist residency and international concert series at the Prager Family Center for the Arts in the historic coastal town of Easton, Maryland. 

An award-winning and bestselling recording artist, her most recent album, released in autumn 2019 on the Orchid Classics label, features her “Latin Concerto” and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, recorded with the Orchestra of the Americas. Her previous recording on Orchid Classics features Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and her first orchestral composition, Ex Patria, which won Montero her first Latin Grammy® for Best Classical Album. Other recordings include Bach and Beyond, which held the top spot on the Billboard Classical Charts for several months and garnered her two Echo Klassik Awards: the 2006 Keyboard Instrumentalist of the Year and 2007 Award for Classical Music without Borders. In 2008, she also received a Grammy® nomination for her album Baroque, and in 2010 she released Solatino, a recording inspired by her Venezuelan homeland and devoted to works by Latin American composers. 

Winner of the 4th International Beethoven Award, Montero is a committed human rights advocate whose voice regularly reaches beyond the concert platform. In 2024, she was named a recipient of the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent by the Oslo Freedom Forum. She was also named an Honorary Consul by Amnesty International in 2015 and recognised with Outstanding Work in the Field of Human Rights by the Human Rights Foundation for her ongoing commitment to human rights advocacy in Venezuela. In January 2020, she was invited to give the Dean’s Lecture at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and has spoken and performed twice at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She was also awarded the 2012 Rockefeller Award for her contribution to the arts and was a featured performer at Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Inauguration. 

Born in Venezuela, Montero started her piano studies at age four, making her concerto debut at age eight in her hometown of Caracas. This led to a scholarship from the government to study privately in the USA and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Hamish Milne. From September 2024, Montero is the Jonathan and Linn Epstein Artist in Residence, and piano faculty member, at the Cleveland Institute of Music.