Piotr Pawlak

Piotr Pawlak began his musical training at the age of six in Gdańsk, studying piano first with Ewa Włodarczyk and then with Professor Waldemar Wojtal, under whom he completed both his secondary and conservatory studies at the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk, graduating with a piano diploma in 2021. He studied pipe organ in parallel under Dr Hanna Dys, and went on to complete a master's degree in orchestral conducting. In 2024 he was admitted to the International Piano Academy Lake Como, and has taken masterclasses with Dang Thai Son, Kevin Kenner, Dmitri Alexeev, Eugen Indjic, Dina Yoffe, Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń, and Janusz Olejniczak, among others.

Pawlak's competition record spans two decades, from early prizes at Chopin competitions for children and youth to First Prize at the 11th International Chopin Competition in Darmstadt (2017) and the 5th Maj Lind International Piano Competition in Helsinki (2022), where he performed Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2023 he won Second Prize at the 2nd International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments in Warsaw, performing on an 1838 Érard fortepiano, and in 2025 he reached the semifinal of the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, where his performance of the rarely programmed Allegro de concert, Op. 46, drew a standing ovation before the final note had finished decaying.

What distinguishes Pawlak within this competitive landscape is his commitment to historically informed performance as a living practice rather than a scholarly exercise. He extemporises his own cadenzas in Classical concertos, revives the nineteenth-century custom of improvised preluding between recital pieces, and performs his own completion of the unfinished ending to Mozart's Fantasia in D minor, K. 397. That same rigour carries into his academic life: alongside his conservatory studies, Pawlak represented Poland at the International Mathematical Olympiad, holds a Master of Science in Mathematics from the University of Gdańsk, and is currently completing doctoral research there on the mapping class groups of non-orientable surfaces — a duality critics have connected directly to the structural clarity of his playing.

Piotr Pawlak was born in Gdańsk in 1998 and began piano lessons at the age of six at the Feliks Nowowiejski School of Music, studying first with Ewa Włodarczyk before entering the studio of Professor Waldemar Wojtal, with whom he would work for over a decade. He studied pipe organ in parallel under Dr Hanna Dys, an early polyphonic training that continues to inform the clarity of his keyboard voicing. Pawlak completed his undergraduate and graduate piano studies at the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk, graduating with a piano diploma in 2021, and went on to complete a further master's degree in orchestral conducting under Marcin Nałęcz-Niesiołowski and Professor Zygmunt Rychert while chairing the academy's Student Council. In 2024 he was admitted to the International Piano Academy Lake Como, and his playing has been shaped by masterclasses with Dang Thai Son, Kevin Kenner, Dmitri Alexeev, Eugen Indjic, Philippe Giusiano, Dina Yoffe, Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń, Wojciech Świtała, and Janusz Olejniczak.

Pawlak's competitive record is unusually extensive, beginning with First Prizes at Chopin competitions for children and youth in Szafarnia and Antonin and continuing through his teenage years with medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad — bronze in Cape Town (2014) and Chiang Mai (2015) — run alongside prizes for organ performance, improvisation, and piano across Poland and abroad. His international breakthrough came with First Prize at the 11th International Chopin Competition in Darmstadt in 2017, where he also won the Best Improvisation Prize on themes from Weber's Der Freischütz, and consolidated in 2022 with First Prize at the 5th Maj Lind International Piano Competition in Helsinki, performing Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Anna-Maria Helsing. In 2023 he won Second Prize at the 2nd International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments in Warsaw, performing Chopin's First Piano Concerto on an 1838 Érard fortepiano with the {oh!} Orkiestra under Václav Luks, and in 2025 he was a semifinalist at the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, where his account of the rarely heard Allegro de concert, Op. 46, drew a standing ovation from the Warsaw audience before the final note had finished decaying.

Central to Pawlak's artistic identity is his revival of performance practices that have largely disappeared from the modern concert stage. Rather than performing published cadenzas by later composers, he extemporises his own in Classical concertos — most notably in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 — preserving Classical harmonic logic while responding directly to the orchestra and the room. In recital, he revives the nineteenth-century custom of unnotated preluding between pieces, and performs his own improvised completion of the ending to Mozart's Fantasia in D minor, K. 397, in place of the ending added by a copyist after Mozart's death. He moves between modern concert grands — Steinway, Fazioli, Yamaha — and historical fortepianos by Érard, Pleyel, and Buchholtz, a dual fluency that shapes his approach to pedalling, touch, and articulation across both instruments.

That same intellectual rigour runs through Pawlak's academic life. Alongside his conservatory training he represented Poland twice at the International Mathematical Olympiad and was a double silver medallist at the Romanian Master of Mathematics, before completing a Master of Science in Mathematics at the University of Gdańsk in 2020. He is currently a doctoral candidate there, researching the mapping class groups of non-orientable surfaces — work that critics have linked directly to the architectural clarity of his large-scale musical structures. Writing after his prize in Helsinki, Finland's Helsingin Sanomat described him simply as “a mathematician at the piano.”

Pawlak's discography centres on historical performance and Polish heritage repertoire, including a 2025 recording of Chopin's First Piano Concerto and Second Sonata on period instruments for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute (NIFC), world-premiere recordings of Józef Elsner's chamber works for keyboard and strings, and a forthcoming 2026 album of Henryk Wieniawski's chamber works for historical violin and fortepiano. His touring schedule runs across Poland, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Ukraine, and beyond, with concerto and recital engagements that move fluidly between modern symphony orchestras, period-instrument ensembles, and solo recital series.