David Louie

Hailed as a “pianistic sensation” (Rhein-Zeitung, Germany), David Louie ranks among the foremost Canadian musicians, a distinguished soloist on piano and harpsichord. His playing has been described as “far from ordinary … enormous pianistic tonal variety for purely musical ends and the kind of animal magnetism only a few artists in each generation generate” (Ottawa Citizen). He is a laureate of the CBC Radio Competition and prestigious international competitions in Santander and Sydney.

David Louie made his New York debut under the auspices of the city’s venerable Peoples’ Symphony Concerts. He has performed with the Vancouver Symphony, Toronto Symphony, National Arts Centre Orchestra (Ottawa), Gulbenkian Chamber Orchestra (Lisbon), and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (London). A respected chamber musician, he has collaborated with the Takacs Quartet, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, and the ARC Ensemble with whom he has toured widely, performing at the Kennedy Center in Washington and at major venues in Rome, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Stockholm and Tel Aviv. His several recordings with the ARC Ensemble on the Sony BMG Masterworks and Chandos labels include two Grammy-nominated releases.

Among the few keyboard artists to traverse traditional boundaries between modern and period performance, David Louie is an advocate of the power of historical instruments to communicate music of past centuries. His YouTube channel documents a fascinating journey through Scarlatti keyboard sonatas performed on an authentic Iberian harpsichord. He has also composed keyboard transcriptions of the entire solo violin works of Bach. With violinist Benjamin Bowman, Louie premiered his critically-acclaimed completion of Mendelssohn’s unfinished Violin Sonata at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and at London’s Wigmore Hall.

Born in Prince George, British Columbia, David Louie is a graduate of the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His teachers include John Perry, Leon Fleisher, Boris Zarankin and Charlotte Nediger. David Louie is currently on faculty at the Glenn Gould School and the Taylor Academy of the Royal Conservatory in Toronto where he teaches piano, chamber music, and historical performance practices. His students have been first prize winners of numerous competitions, including the International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments and the Canadian Music Competition (Grand Prize). He has given masterclasses in the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Israel, and Australia. www.davidlouiepiano.com