Jean-Philippe Sylvestre

In 2008, Jean-Philippe Sylvestre received the prestigious Virginia Parker Prize, the highest distinction awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Recipient of the first prize and the people’s choice award at the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal competition, he is also a winner of the CBC National Competition for Young Performers, the people’s choice award and the Concertino Praga International Competition.

Jean-Philippe Sylvestre claimed first prize three times at the Canadian Music Competition as well as the highest score at one of them. In 2015, he was granted a residency in Paris by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. He has performed in a number of famous venues, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Gaveau and Cortot halls and Musée Jaquemart-André in Paris, the Oriol Martorell hall in Barcelona, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the St-Pierre des Cuisines auditorium in Toulouse and the Fundação de Educação Artística in Brazil, to name only those.

More recently, he was invited to give a concert at the prestigious Piano Folies festival in Touquet, France, which was followed by a seven-concert tour in Australia. He also performed at the Wilfrid-Pelletier, Pierre-Mercure and Bourgie halls in Montreal, the Glenn Gould Studio and George Weston Recital Hall in Toronto, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and Domaine Forget in Saint-Irénée and was asked by Kent Nagano to perform a recital in the Classical Spree series.

In recent years, he has been heard as a soloist with the Nürnberg Philharmonic Orchestra in Germany and the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, Orchestre Métropolitain, Orchestre symphonique de Laval, Orchestre classique de Montréal and Orchestre Symphonique de Longueuil.

Jean-Philippe Sylvestre has made several recordings, most notably of concertos by André Mathieu, Rachmaninoff and Jacques Hétu with the Orchestre Métropolitain and Orchestre symphonique de Laval. The discs have received rave reviews and Juno, ADISQ and Opus award nominations. He will record another disc, this time with the London Symphony Orchestra, in April and will perform in the United States in May and at the Philharmonie in Berlin in June. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has called him a “poet of the piano.”