Lise de la Salle

We are thrilled to host Lise de la Salle, who is one of today’s most exciting young artists and musicians.

Lise started playing the piano at age four and gave her first concert at nine years of age in a live broadcast on Radio France. Her career has spanned over 20 years, during which she has played with leading orchestras across the US including Boston, Chicago and Washington Symphony Orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra. She has also performed around the globe including with the BBC Symphony and London Symphony Orchestras, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre National de Franc and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra among many others.

Her long-standing exclusive relationship with prominent French record label Naïve Records has resulted in an extensive, award-winning discography, from classical repertoire to cross-genre concepts. It includes an all-Chopin disc with a live orchestral and solo recording with the DSO’s very own Fabio Luisi conducting Staatskapelle Dresden. Her latest album “When do we Dance?” (2021) presents an odyssey of dances through a whole century.

Lise’s playing inspired a Washington Post critic to write, “For much of the concert, the audience had to remember to breathe… the exhilaration didn’t let up for a second until her hands came off the keyboard.”

In her blog entitled “Inhabiting Uncertainty,” Lise says, “To play is not to reproduce. It is to offer each time, to undress a little, it is vulnerability, a subtle but sincere offering, carried by breath . . . Playing then becomes an act of absolute listening. Accepting that it may not match the ideal one carried in their heart, welcoming what arises, however fragile, however dissonant. Letting it be, letting it resonate. It is not giving in to chaos, it is learning to dance with it . . . So, I play. Not to fix a meaning, but to let it emerge.”

Lise studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 2004 she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. She shares her musical talents and knowledge through educational outreach to other young artists, and conducts master classes in many of the cities where she performs.