For Samson Tsoy, music never exists in isolation. Each of his projects are an encounter in which music, place and audience transform one another. Whether in a concert hall, a museum, an industrial space or the West Texas desert, it acquires new meaning through its resonance with the place and the other art forms. A pianist of exceptional imagination and one of the rare musicians equally at home as performer, curator and interdisciplinary collaborator, he has become internationally recognized for work that moves seamlessly across the world’s leading orchestras, concert halls and cultural organizations. In recent seasons, his work has ranged from performances with the Philharmonia Orchestra and regular appearances at Wigmore Hall to collaborations with David Hockney, Richard Serra, the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
As both a soloist and chamber musician, Tsoy’s work has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Edinburgh International Festival, Klavierfestival Ruhr, the Aldeburgh Festival and the Festival de La Roque d’Anthéron. As concerto soloist, recent highlights include performing both Brahms Piano Concertos in a single evening with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, Scriabin’s Prometheus with its original color-light design alongside the Philharmonia Orchestra and Gergely Madaras, Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate with the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrey Boreyko, and his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. He was also the first ever classical musician invited to perform for the opening of the Munich Security Conference, one of the world’s most important political forums. For Tsoy, programming is itself an art form. Rather than treating the concert as a fixed format, he shapes each program in response to history, the surroundings and the ideas it can illuminate. At Gagosian Paris and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures became the setting for performances that brought music into dialogue with sculpture and space. In 2025, David Hockney and the Fondation Louis Vuitton invited him to co-curate and perform a musical weekend in dialogue with the artist’s landmark retrospective. The same year, together with Pavel Kolesnikov, he created a pioneering residency with Ballroom Marfa in Texas, reimagining an entire landscape as the setting for an extended musical journey.
Critics and writers have consistently recognized both the originality and the fearlessness of Tsoy’s musicianship. Andrew Marr compared watching him perform at Wigmore Hall to “a fearless Formula One driver taking a car round chicane after chicane”; reviewing Prometheus, The Guardian wrote that “Samson Tsoy triumphed as the intrepid piano soloist”; while The Arts Desk praised his “very rare ability” to move effortlessly between extraordinary delicacy and “colossal Russian-school pianism.” His work has also been the subject of essays by the American writer Lawrence Weschler, who has chronicled Tsoy’s collaborations with David Hockney, Richard Serra and Ballroom Marfa. The debut album Inmost Heart released by Linn Records also established Tsoy as a recording artist of exceptional individuality. Rather than offering a conventional debut recital, the album explores profound artistic connections between Bach, Brahms, Busoni and Reger, revealing an approach to programming that has become central to his artistic identity. Every work contributes to a larger narrative, inviting listeners to experience music as an evolving conversation across centuries rather than a sequence of isolated masterpieces. His subsequent recordings with Pavel Kolesnikov for harmonia mundi have further strengthened his reputation, reflecting the same imaginative approach to repertoire that characterises his work on stage.
In 2019, Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov founded the Ragged Music Festival, an internationally acclaimed artist-led festival that transforms each host venue into a site-specific creative laboratory. Shaped by the identity of each location, its programs bring music into dialogue with architecture, history and the wider arts. Alongside its annual London edition at the historic Ragged School Museum, the festival has developed international residencies in partnership with leading cultural organizations. The 2026 edition at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw unfolded as a twenty-four-hour exploration of the idea of Rite, bringing together five interconnected performances through collaborations with choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and artists including Gidon Kremer, Elisabeth Leonskaja and Alina Ibragimova.
Alongside his solo career, Tsoy has established one of today’s most celebrated chamber music partnerships with pianist Pavel Kolesnikov. Their performances and recordings have received exceptional international acclaim. The New York Times selected the duo among its Best Classical Music Performances and Best Classical Recordings of the Year, while Gramophone wrote of their recording of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye: “I’d struggle to recommend any above this one.”
2026-2027
