Jean-Louis Haguenauer

Pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer is active as a chamber player with many different groups, as a vocal accompanist, and as a solo player; he has a large repertory but has specialized in the music of Debussy. Based in the U.S., he is a noted educator. Haguenauer was born in Paris in 1954. He attended the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris and the Geneva Conservatory, taking piano classes from Germaine Mounier, Alfred Loewenguth, and Jean Fassina, among others. From the former school, he graduated in 1973 with a Licence de Concerts award, unanimously bestowed, and in Geneva, he took the school’s first prize for virtuosity, as well as a counterpoint and fugue prize, when he graduated in 1977. He also studied analysis and composition with Nadia Boulanger and Henri Dutilleux. Beginning his career in the late 1980s, Haguenauer appeared as a soloist on major French concert series and at a variety of summer festivals, as well as on French radio and television. He collaborated over two decades with tenor Gilles Ragon, performing both French and German song repertory. Haguenauer co-founded the Galpérine-Tsan-Haguenauer Piano Trio in Paris in 1988 and has collaborated with an exceptionally wide variety of chamber musicians, including the Fine Arts Quartet, the Ebène Quartet, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, and he has been a member of the Florence Gould Hall Chamber Players and American Chamber Players series. Haguenauer has recorded for Ligia, Maguelone, Meridian, and other labels. In 2014, he issued on Ligia, with various singers, a complete cycle in four volumes of Debussy's songs, performed for the first time on Debussy’s piano. In 2020, Haguenauer moved to Harmonia Mundi for a recording of Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies. Haguenauer is an important educator, having taught at the Strasbourg Conservatory from 1988 to 1998, and since then at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. ~ James Manheim