In 1969, after winning first prize in the CBC National Talent Festival, Janina Fialkowska pursued her studies in Paris and then at The Juilliard School of Music in New York. Her career was launched in 1974 by Arthur Rubinstein, who took her as his protégée, impressed by her performance at the inauguration of his own piano compe tition. Since then, she has toured Europe and Asia and has performed with the foremost North American orchestras and with major orchestras in Asia, Europe and Israel. She is particularly distinguished as one of the great interpreters of the piano works of Chopin and Mozart and has won special recognition for a series of important premieres, most notably the world première performance with the Chicago Sym phony, in 1990, of the newly discovered Piano Concerto No. 3 by Franz Liszt.
An Officer of the Order of Canada, Ms Fialkowska is the recipient of the “2012 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in Classical Music”, Canada’s foremost honor for excellence in the performing arts, becoming the first female instrumentalist to receive this honour. In 2013, she received the coveted “Instrumentalist of the year” award from the prestigious BBC Music Magazine for her recording “Chopin Recital No. 2”. The first opus had made it into the Gramophone classic charts as well as among the London’s Sunday Times Top 10 “Best classical recordings of the year”.
As the founding director (1993) of the Piano Six project and its successor, Piano Plus, Janina Fialkowska has helped Canadian audiences discover some of Canada’s greatest classical music artists. In 2010, she also hosted her first “International Piano Academy” which was held in Bavaria.
She shares her expertise in several master classes around the world, and regularly serves as jury member of major international competitions. She now resides in Germany.
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