Photo: Alexandra de Léal

After graduating from the Paris Conservatoire and obtaining her Concert Diploma from the École normale de musique in Paris by unanimous vote, Lydia Jardon was recognized by the Cziffra Foundation and won the Milosz Magin International Competition.

Lydia Jardon then chose to launch a concert career. In July 2001 she was chosen for the opening concert at the Newport Festival in the United States. Hailed by the public, she was invited back the following year. After playing in France, Germany, Austria, Uruguay, Brazil, Turkey, Colombia and many Eastern European countries, she interpreted Beethoven’s Fifth Concerto in Japan at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Yuri Nakamura, Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto in Bratislava with the Slovak Radio Orchestra conducted by Jean-Paul Penin and Rhapsody in Blue at Geneva’s Victoria Hall with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Arthur Fagen.

She was invited in February 2009 by the French embassy in Saudi Arabia for several concerts playing for the French, British and American community, and master classes. In September, she performed at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris on the occasion of the release of her latest disc.

Concerning Lydia Jardon’s piano playing, some have spoken of a mysterious alchemy of fieriness and distance as regards the text, an inextinguishable passion and meticulous control of expression. She has shown a predilection for eruptive scores, those requiring the virtuoso’s intrepid élan as much as attention to detail (the reviews of her previous Scriabin recording reflected this). She has thus just recorded her ninth disc, devoted to Nikolai Miaskovsky’s Sonatas nos. 2, 3 and 4.

But Lydia Jardon does not only play for the public. She is in touch with musicians in difficulty from all over the world. In 1998, she gave a fund-raising concert at UNESCO for the André Malraux Centre in Sarajevo before traveling to Bosnia. Noticing how the best music teachers had deserted many cities, she invited two pianists, a Serb and a Bosnian, to Ushant and organized concerts with them in Brittany, thus showing that music is more powerful than violence.

Not only a truly passionate artist, she is also a thoughtful artist, constantly getting involved and thinking up the most varied projects.

Fascinated by the island of Ushant off the coast of Brittany, she has been organizing a Summer Academy there for professionals and advanced amateurs since 1998.

“It is a magical place; its wild beauty is conducive to meditation, work and asceticism. It is the ideal place to bring together established musicians who want to hone their skills for a week.”

In August 2001, she created a Festival that is both exotic and original and has served as its Artistic Director ever since: Women Musicians at Ushant, a place also known as the “Island of Women”. Here, she conceives original programming including forgotten scores by women composers unjustly relegated to the footnotes of history, such as Fanny Mendelssohn, Alma Mahler, Hélène de Montgeroult, Mel Bonis, Clara Schumann, Marie Jaëll, Rebecca Clarke, Louise Farrenc and Cécile Chaminade.

In the iodized wake of this festival, at the end of 2001, she founded the first record company for women: AR RÉ-SÉ (meaning “those women there” in Breton), an independent organization with which she unearths forgotten scores by great masters who are part of the universal heritage — Koechlin, Medtner, Lekeu, Magnard… — making it a point of honor to entrust them to excellent women performers who are often just setting out on their careers. She has already produced the Psophos, Ardeo, Antigone Quartets, soprano Norah Amsellem, pianists Dana Ciocarlie, Elena Filonova, Sarah Lavaud, violonists Irina Muresanu, Mireille Jardon, and composer Florentine Mulsant.

Lydia Jardon is regularly invited by French radios and television. In 2006, a 52’ documentary was filmed on Ushant during the festival and broadcast on French television in June 2007 and April 2009. In 2006 and again in 2008, and most recently in September 2009, her work has been honored in reports broadcast on the news.