The pianist whose chamber orchestra is named after a joke translation of his surname
Schiff means boat in German, and so does barca in Italian. When András Schiff formed an occasional chamber orchestra in 1999, he called it the Cappella Andrea Barca and even wrote a comic biography for the imaginary Andrea. The joke belongs to one of the most admired Bach interpreters alive.
Schiff was born in Budapest on 21 December 1953, the only child of a Jewish family, and started lessons at five. At the Franz Liszt Academy he studied with Elisabeth Vadász, Pál Kadosa and Ferenc Rados. Rados, he recalled, never offered a word of praise, which left him with a useful habit of self-doubt. He took fourth prize at the Tchaikovsky competition in 1974 and shared third at Leeds in 1975 with Pascal Devoyon.
He left Hungary in 1979. Touring kept him from meeting US residency rules, so he became Austrian in 1987, then gave that up after the far right rose in Austria and took British citizenship in 2001. Since 2011 he has publicly refused to perform in Hungary, citing antisemitism and hostility towards Roma. He lives with his wife, the violinist Yūko Shiokawa, across homes in London, Florence, Kamakura and Basel, and speaks six languages.
His reputation rests on Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. For Decca he recorded much of Bach's keyboard output plus complete Mozart and Schubert sonatas, and for the publisher G. Henle he supplied fingerings for a Well-Tempered Clavier edition in 2006 and cadenzas for Mozart concertos from 2007. He likes to explain before he plays: in 2024 he lectured at Wigmore Hall on the Art of Fugue and then performed it. He teaches at the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin and has led masterclasses at Juilliard and Oberlin.
The honours have piled up. A 1990 Grammy came for Bach's English Suites, followed by the Bartók Prize in 1991, the Kossuth Prize in 1996, the Royal Philharmonic Society gold medal in December 2013 and a knighthood in 2014. Leipzig gave him its Bach Medal in 2022, and in 2025 he won the Praemium Imperiale for music. He also directed the Musiktage Mondsee festival from 1989 to 1998.
Source: András Schiff
