Born to Venetian parents in Lyon in 1959, Roger Muraro began studying the saxophone in his native city before teaching himself to play the piano. At the age of nineteen he entered Yvonne Loriod’s class at the Paris Conservatoire and met Olivier Messiaen. He quickly became established as one of the leading interpreters of the French composer, to whom he devoted a complete recording of the solo piano works, finished in 2001, that earned unanimous critical acclaim. His performances of Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus and the complete Catalogue d’oiseaux are regarded as not only a prodigious feat, but also an intimate appropriation of the works of Messiaen, with which he identifies totally.
While he is gifted with a dazzling technique, having studied for several years with Éliane Richepin and won prizes at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Liszt Competition in Parma, his playing is invariably placed at the service of poetry and sincerity. His artistry, at once oneiric and lucid, imaginative and rigorous, is equally at home in Mussorgsky, Ravel, Albeniz, Rachmaninov, Debussy and in Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, from whose music he extracts the full range of emotion, colours, hypersensitive Romanticism and sonic atmospheres.
Roger Muraro is a welcome guest as a recitalist in the world’s leading concert halls and works with today’s foremost conductors and most prestigious ensembles.
Most of his CDs are recorded for Universal, for instance the complete recording of the solo piano works of Messiaen, a box called Regards sur le XXe siècle including works of Bartok, Boulez, Dutilleux, Ives, Jolas, Schoenberg, Tremblay and Messiaen in a tribute to Claude Helffer, the Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz in the transcription for piano solo by Liszt or the concertos of Ravel, among others.
In June 2017, Roger Muraro has played in Tokyo the world creation of a work for piano solo by Olivier Messiaen (Fauvettes de l’Hérault - concert des garrigues) from the sketches he has found in the archives of the composer at the National Library in Paris and collected by Roger Muraro himself. This piece has been played for the first time in France in Paris at the Festival Présences in February 2018 and was released in world premiere by harmonia mundi in November 2018.
He has also recently recorded in world premier the concerto for piano « Step Right Up » written by the Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça, with the Orchestra of the Gulbenkian Foundation conducted by Benjamin Shwartz.
At a turning point in his musical life, Roger Muraro reconnected with a repertoire that he had not played for many years, ranging from Mozart to Schumann, Brahms and Scriabin.
