Biography
One of Ireland’s most successful musicians, Finghin Collins was born in Dublin in 1977. He studied piano at the Royal Irish Academy of Music with John O’Conor and at the Geneva Conservatoire with Dominique Merlet. Winner of the RTÉ Musician of the Future Competition in 1994 and the Classical Category at the National Entertainment Awards in Ireland in 1998, he went on to take first prize at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Switzerland in 1999. Since then he has continued to enjoy a flourishing international career that takes him all over Europe and the United States, as well to the Far East and Australia.
Collins has performed with many manor international orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Gulbenkian Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Conductors with whom he has collaborated include Frans Brüggen, Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph Eschenbach, Gianandrea Noseda, Sakari Oramo, Tadaaki Otaka, Heinrich Schiff, Vassily Sinaisky, Leonard Slatkin and Gábor Tákacs-Nagy.
Performances across Europe have included such prestigious venues as Symphony Hall Birmingham, Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, The Barbican, London, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Théâtre du Châtelet and Salle Cortot Paris, Auditorio Nacional Madrid, Palao de la Musica Valencia, Gulbenkian Hall Lisbon, Sala Verdi Milan, Teatro Manzoni Bologna, Konzerthaus Berlin, Konzerthaus Vienna, Franz Liszt Academy Budapest, Philharmonic Hall Warsaw, Carnegie Hall, New York and the Kennedy Center, Washington DC. Further festival appearances include the BBC Proms, La Roque d’Anthéron (France), Lockenhaus Festival (Austria), Delft International Chamber Music Festival and Storioni Festival (The Netherlands), Chopin Festival (Poland), Musical Olympus Festival (Russia), the Wuhan International Piano Festival (China) as well as the Mostly Mozart Festival.
Chamber music plays a significant role in his musical life and he has collaborated with London Winds and the Aviv, Bennewitz, Callino, Chilingirian, Ebène, Goldner, Navarra, Shanghai, Skampa, St Petersburg, Vanbrugh, Vertavo and Vogler String Quartets. Chamber music partners have included violinists Tasmin Little and Ilya Gringolts, cellists Han-Na Chang, clarinettists Emma Johnson, Michael Collins and Sharon Kam, singers Ailish Tynan and James Gilchrist, as well as his sister pianist Dearbhla Collins and many others.
Recordings for Claves Records in Switzerland include two double Schumann CDs (Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice) and works for piano and orchestra by Stanford with the RTÉ NSO and Kenneth Montgomery (Editor’s Choice, May 2011). RTÉ lyric fm recorded four Mozart piano concertos directed from the keyboard with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra; a Chopin recital CD was released in 2017.
Finghin Collins is active as a programmer, commissioner and concert presenter in Ireland, having been Artistic Director of the New Ross Piano Festival since its inception in 2006, and Artistic Director of Music for Galway since 2013. He co-curates the annual Dublin Song Series.
In March 2023 Finghin was appointed Artistic Director of the Dublin International Piano Competition.
Representation: UK and sundry territories
Contact: Aminah Domloge