She has performed with the world’s top orchestras: the Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Munich Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestre National de France, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and Sydney Symphony, to name a few. Her artistic residencies included the São Paulo Symphony, Prague Radio Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, Basel Symphony, the Rheingau Music Festival, and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. She has collaborated with some of the most distinguished conductors, such as Marin Alsop, Elim Chan, Stéphane Denève, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Dalia Stasevska, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Alexander Shelley, and Xian Zhang, as well as the late Claudio Abbado, Roger Norrington, and Lorin Maazel.
The 26/27 season takes Montero on tours across Europe and North and South America with solo recitals in Lausanne; at the Klavierfestival Ruhr and Mozarteum in Salzburg; as well as in Denver, Kansas City, Portland, La Jolla, and Cartagena. Her current recital program, Iberia, showcases Spain’s rich influence on the piano repertoire through works by Albéniz, Granados, Alicia de Larrocha, Scarlatti, and Chopin. She also returns to the Zurich Chamber Orchestra; the New World Symphony with Stéphane Denève; DSO Berlin with Dalia Stasevska; the Frankfurt Museumsorchester with Giancarlo Guerrero; and continues to tour with her own Latin Concerto—with the Seattle Symphony and New Jersey Symphony, both under Xian Zhang; the Swedish Chamber Orchestra with Martin Fröst; and the North Carolina Symphony with Carlos Miguel Prieto. Last season, Montero served as Artist-in-Residence at London’s Barbican Centre, where she gave the UK premiere of her piano quintet, Canaima, with the Calidore String Quartet and made her debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Gabriela Montero enjoys engaging directly with her recital audiences, offering spontaneous, complex improvisations on themes suggested by concertgoers. She is known for improvising cadenzas in Mozart concertos, making every performance an unrepeatable experience. Montero has given solo recitals at Wigmore Hall; Kennedy Center; Carnegie Hall; Vienna Konzerthaus; Berlin Philharmonie; Frankfurt Alte Oper; Cologne Philharmonie; Leipzig Gewandhaus; Sydney Opera House; Paris Philharmonie; Seoul LG Arts Center; Hong Kong City Hall; and the National Concert Hall in Taipei, among many others. She has enjoyed musical collaborations with fellow artists including Gautier Capuçon, with whom she has recorded an album and composed a commissioned work, and Martha Argerich, most recently at Munich’s Isarphilharmonie and Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in 2024.
Montero’s first orchestral composition, Ex Patria—a tone poem on the descent of Venezuela into chaos—was premiered in 2011 by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The recording of the piece paired with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 won a Latin Grammy® Award for Best Classical Album. Her next composition, Piano Concerto No. 1, was inspired by the South American continent in its chiaroscuro complexity. Known as the Latin Concerto, it premiered in 2016 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with the MDR Sinfonieorchester. Montero has since played it with the San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, New World Symphony, Vienna Radio and Polish National Radio Symphonies, BBC Scottish and Antwerp Symphonies, Swedish Radio Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. The concerto has been performed more than fifty times across five continents.
In 2025, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition commissioned Montero, who also served on the jury, to write a new piece for solo piano. The work, Rachtime, initially improvised and later revised, was performed by all competitors. Montero is currently working on a new symphonic piece inspired by Frederick Chopin and George Sand, to be premiered in 2028.
An award-winning and bestselling recording artist, Montero released her Latin Concerto paired with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, recorded with the Orchestra of the Americas, on the Orchid Classics label. Her earlier releases include Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2; the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto; cello sonatas with Gautier Capuçon; Solatino, inspired by her Venezuelan homeland; and Bach and Beyond, an album that topped the Billboard Classical Chart for several months and earned her two Echo Klassik Awards—Keyboard Instrumentalist of the Year and the Award for Classical Music Without Borders. Her solo album Baroque, featuring real-time improvisations, received a Grammy® nomination.
Montero’s voice as a human rights advocate reaches beyond the concert halls and has met with international recognition. She is the recipient of the Rockefeller Award for her contribution to the arts; the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights; the Gold Medal with Plaque of Honor from the Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Letters in Paris; the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent awarded by the Human Rights Foundation; and the 2026 Pau Casals Award from the Kronberg Academy. Montero serves as honorary consul of Amnesty International; she has given the Dean’s Lecture at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and spoken and performed at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
In 2025, she performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, at the invitation of laureate María Corina Machado. In the same year, she was one of a handful of celebrated pianists to perform at a concert for Pope Leo XIV in Vatican City. Montero was one of the invited performers at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration in January 2009.
Gabriela Montero began to study piano at age four in her native Venezuela, making her concerto debut at age eight in her hometown of Caracas and moving soon after with her family to study in the United States. She graduated as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she studied with Hamish Milne. She maintains an ongoing artist’s residency in the historic Chesapeake town of Easton, Maryland, where she curates an international concert series, Gabriela Montero at Prager. A dedicated educator, she co-founded the global mentorship program Gabriela Montero Piano Lab with partners OAcademy and currently serves as the Jonathan and Linn Epstein Artist-in-Residence and piano faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
