Life

Jean-Bernard Pommier was born in Béziers on 17 August 1944, in the last weeks of the German occupation of southern France. He was the eighth child of Robert Pommier, organist of the church of the Madeleine. His father was, as he put it himself at seventeen, a plain working man, but everyone in the family loved music, and so did all his brothers and sisters.

He found the instrument on his own. One Sunday morning after mass the family went home without him and looked for him everywhere. Then his father heard the organ start up again, climbed back to the loft, and found the four-year-old with his hands on the keys.

The very next day Robert Pommier took him to Mina Kosloff, a Russian Jewish pianist, trained at the Kharkiv Conservatory, who had taken refuge in Béziers during the war. From four to eleven she made him work three hours every day at her house. “I owe her everything,” he said. At seven he gave his first public concert with her at the second piano, in Mozart's A major Concerto K. 488.

I owe her everything.

The boy was soon heard beyond Béziers. In April 1952, at seven, he represented his town with Pierre Jamel in the national radio tournament “Le Royaume de la musique”. In August 1953, aged eight, he was one of the child prodigies of the RTF programme “Petites étoiles à tous les firmaments”, playing Bach preludes, on the organ. The next year the Société archéologique, scientifique et littéraire de Béziers presented “the young prodigy” at its annual public session, and the hall, its bulletin records, vibrated with enthusiasm.

His father also took him to Prades, in the Pyrenees, where Pablo Casals held his festival, and introduced him to Casals himself. There the boy played for the pianists who came: for Mieczysław Horszowski, for Clara Haskil, for William Kapell. The one he never played for was a young American called Eugene Istomin, who would later become the mentor and friend of his life.

The Languedoc never left him. Decades later he made music and records at the Abbaye de Fontfroide, near Narbonne, he returned again and again to play in Béziers and across Occitanie, and he spent his last years close to where it all began. Asked about going back to his roots, he answered: “I left in order to come back, and I come back in order to leave.”

At fourteen he left for Paris. He became the last pupil of Yves Nat, the great French interpreter of Beethoven and Schumann, who, like him, had been born in Béziers. He entered the Conservatoire in the class of Pierre Sancan and took his premier prix there in 1961.

At the same time he studied conducting with Eugène Bigot. It was a second vocation that would take years to come fully into the light, but it was there from the beginning.

In 1960 he won first prize at the International Young Musicians Competition in Berlin. The following year he received the Prix de la Guilde des Artistes Solistes Français. The magazine Pianiste later recalled that in Berlin he had won among the over-fifteens, ahead of Maria João Pires.

The first records followed at once: Beethoven's “Emperor” Concerto with the Orchestre Lamoureux and Dimitri Chorafas for the Club Français du Disque, the piano solos on Wal-Berg's orchestral record “Soirée romantique” for Barclay, then, in 1964, Mozart's concertos for two and three pianos alongside his teacher Pierre Sancan and Catherine Silie, and a first recital for La Voix de Son Maître, simply titled “Le 1er disque de Jean-Bernard Pommier”. His 1963 “Emperor” can still be heard in full, digitised by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In the spring of 1962, Moscow held the second International Tchaikovsky Competition. The first, four years earlier, had made Van Cliburn a legend overnight; this one was followed around the world and ended with Vladimir Ashkenazy and John Ogdon sharing first prize.

Jean-Bernard Pommier was seventeen, the youngest pianist to reach the final. Asked by his Russian hosts to say something about himself, he began: “I am the eighth child in the family of a village organist, in a small place called Béziers.” The jury, chaired by Emil Gilels, awarded him a diploma of honour with a special commendation.

He had played Mozart and Rodion Shchedrin, and Nikita Khrushchev, who liked both, came to kiss him, as his fellow Sancan pupil Michel Béroff later told it. The Dutch press reported that at the Kremlin reception after his Mozart concerto Khrushchev embraced him, and that Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who was there too, told him his Mozart had touched her heart. A few seconds of him playing Mozart survive in the Soviet newsreel of the competition.

I am the eighth child in the family of a village organist, in a small place called Béziers.

The Soviet daily Pravda, reporting on the evening when he and John Ogdon played, introduced him as the youngest of the competitors, seventeen years old and already twice a first-prize winner, in Berlin in 1960 and in Paris in 1961.

In Moscow he also recorded Mozart's Concerto K. 488 with Arvid Jansons for Melodiya, together with a Bach prelude and fugue, Mozart's Sonata K. 309 and a Debussy prelude. Decades later Eliso Virsaladze, who took third prize that year, said the young Frenchman who received “only a diploma” had been far more interesting than some of the prize-winners.

Paris welcomed him back as a young star. His Salle Pleyel debut brought four encores, and posters across the city announced him. He lived in a small rented room in Montparnasse and practised for hours a day; the composer who gave him the most trouble, he said, was Mozart. In a bistro called Au Clairon des Chasseurs nobody thought it odd when one of the regulars, shirtsleeves rolled up, sat down at the piano and played.

Moscow opened the doors. EMI signed him soon afterwards, and the engagements followed, first in Europe and then in America. He returned to the Soviet Union again and again over the next twenty years; in Baku a critic praised a vivid, fully formed personality, and in a Leningrad hotel the Dutch violinist Theo Olof found himself talking with him in Russian. In 2010 he came back as soloist and conductor to the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, where the competition had been held.

In 1963, in Sofia, he played Ravel's G major Concerto for the first time, under Jerzy Semkow. At the interval a man came backstage and spoke to him in French. Pommier recognised him at once from the summers in Prades: it was Eugene Istomin, in Bulgaria for two weeks as a cultural ambassador. They had lunch, and the young Frenchman was taken along to the party for Istomin at the United States Embassy, where, he remembered, you could imagine there were microphones everywhere. Out of that fortnight came three friendships Istomin kept for life: with Semkow, with the ambassador Eugenie Anderson, and with Pommier.

It was the beginning of forty years, which Istomin described not as teaching but as “an ongoing dialogue between colleagues.” The lessons ran both ways. Istomin found in him something of William Kapell, as demanding, as quick, wanting an explanation for everything; the young man in turn urged his elder to look after his hands, to write down his fingerings and to widen his programmes. When they met, Pommier had never heard Istomin's recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov concertos. He found them, and they left him speechless. Years later Istomin gave him the cufflinks Eugene Ormandy had bequeathed to him.

In 1966, after his debut with the Dallas Symphony, he spent a month at Meadow Brook, the summer home of the Detroit Symphony, where the trio of Istomin, Isaac Stern and Leonard Rose was in residence. Each had brought his best student: Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell and Pommier. They lived together as one family, and Pommier turned the pages at the trio's rehearsals and concerts. The same year, on 30 January, he played Bartók's Second Concerto under Pierre Boulez at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a performance later issued on record.

The following decades took him to the great halls of Europe, America and Asia. With Herbert von Karajan he began a long collaboration: Bach's Concerto for four keyboards at the Salzburg Festival in 1971, the year of his debut there, alongside Walter Klien and Justus Frantz; Beethoven's Third Concerto in Berlin in 1973 and at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1974; Bach's D minor Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Großes Festspielhaus on 30 July 1973; Bartók's Third in Berlin in January 1974; and Mozart's K. 488 in Berlin on 25 September 1974, a performance later released on disc.

He also played under Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim, with whom he performed the complete Beethoven concertos with the Orchestre de Paris, Zubin Mehta, Bernard Haitink, Kurt Sanderling, Kurt Masur, Charles Dutoit, Simon Rattle and Armin Jordan, and with Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia in 1973. In April 1979 he played Saint-Saëns's Second Concerto with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic. In December 1976 he stepped in at short notice for the ill Maurizio Pollini with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The Berlin, Salzburg, Edinburgh, Jerusalem, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Casals, Hollywood Bowl and Melbourne festivals all invited him.

In the autumn of 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, the Israel Philharmonic spent seven weeks playing on air force bases and in hospitals, with Mehta, Stern, Zukerman and Barenboim. The young French pianist was among them, and nothing would persuade him to leave the country while he could still be of use there.

The freedom and originality of his phrasing, combined with an extremely beautiful and clear sonority built on the quality of the attack.

Chamber music was as essential to him as the concerto. His partners included Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, David Oistrakh, Christian Ferras, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Leonard Rose, Jaime Laredo, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Alexander Schneider, Paul Tortelier, and the Guarneri and Vermeer quartets.

In 1972 he recorded Claude Bolling's Sonata for Two Pianists with the composer; the critic Frank Ténot called it the historic meeting of the classical piano with the jazz piano. The same year he played Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos with Istomin at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. With Anne Queffélec he recorded Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos. It was Pommier who put Istomin in touch with André Malraux when Istomin dreamed of playing in China; Malraux took the matter up with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong.

Carnegie Hall's own archive records fourteen of his appearances. The first is on 2 March 1975, on the Strasbourg Philharmonic's first American tour under Alain Lombard, with Saint-Saëns's Second Concerto; the same tour took him to Columbia, South Carolina, and to Duke University. In September 1976 he took part in three evenings of Isaac Stern's “Stern and Friends”: Chausson's Concert with Itzhak Perlman and the Guarneri Quartet, Schubert's F minor Fantasy for four hands with the young Yefim Bronfman, and the “Trout” Quintet with Stern, Zukerman and Rose. In June 1981 he played in five concerts of the Schubert Festival, and in June 1982 in the Carnegie Hall Serenades: Bach with Cho-Liang Lin, Beethoven's Fourth Concerto with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra under Zukerman and, on 6 June, Beethoven's “Hammerklavier” Sonata in the Main Hall, the sonata with which he would open his Gaveau cycle thirty-three years later.

He was the pianist that orchestras called when a great colleague fell ill. He replaced Maurizio Pollini with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in December 1976 and again in the spring of 1979, in Schumann's Concerto, and in October 1979 he came from France to Florence to take the place of Sviatoslav Richter under Riccardo Muti, playing Beethoven's First Concerto. During Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven cycle with the Orchestre de Paris in February 1977, the Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, told Le Monde that he had loved the concert and that the pianist had brought out the Mozartian accents of the First Concerto.

Alexander Schneider, who had organised Casals's festivals, wrote in his memoirs that two of the places in France where he most enjoyed playing sonatas with Eugene Istomin and with Pommier were the little chapel of the Château de Reux, in Normandy, and Les Treilles, near Tourtour in the Var. The Brahms cello sonatas that Pommier recorded with Leonard Rose in 1982 were, The Strad's timeline notes, the last commercial recording the great cellist made, two years before his death.

In 1983 five of Pierre Sancan's former pupils, Abdel Rahman El Bacha, Michel Béroff, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Jean-Philippe Collard and Emile Naoumoff, met at La Roque d'Anthéron to play a concert in honour of their teacher. In 1986, when Istomin founded the William Kapell Competition in Maryland, the jury drew on the American piano world, Ax, Kuerti, Orozco, Graffman, Magaloff, Browning; the one Frenchman on it was Pommier, twenty years after he had turned the pages at Meadow Brook.

The conductor that Eugène Bigot had trained was never far away. On 30 April 1969 the Concerts Renaissances at the Abbaye de Fontfroide billed him as pianist and conductor, at twenty-four. It was the start of an eighteen-year association with the abbey: with Alexander Schneider and Paul Tortelier in 1970, with the oboist Maurice Bourgue and the Quatuor Bernède in 1972, with Istomin as soloist in a Bach and Beethoven concert he conducted in 1974, and a recital for the festival's twentieth anniversary in 1987. In June 1984 he invited the photographer Pascale Leprince-Ringuet to Fontfroide; she stayed thirty years, following the Concerts Renaissances “with Jean-Bernard Pommier and his soloist friends”. In 1990 Le Monde wrote that the abbey's music owed its life to Nicolas d'Andoque and the Association des amis de Fontfroide, who had organised concerts since 1967 “with Jean-Bernard Pommier”.

In 1975 he first stood in front of the Northern Sinfonia in Newcastle, as a guest. The orchestra had never heard of him, and in those first years he had barely more than the simplest English. It made no difference: within minutes the players saw a conductor who was assured and completely clear about what he wanted, all of it said with his hands.

That August he took the orchestra to Prades. The boy who had played for Horszowski and Haskil there conducted the closing concert of Casals's festival: Mozart's Haffner Symphony, his Piano Concerto K. 459 and Haydn's Symphony No. 99. Le Monde, noting that he was until then known mainly as a pianist, singled out the two rarely played scores.

It became a bond of thirty-five years. He came back every year for a quarter of a century as soloist and conductor, and from 1996 to 1999 he was the orchestra's artistic director and principal conductor. Together they toured the North East, London, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Andorra, Norway, Switzerland, India and the United States; in 1988 they played at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona. In September 1988, sponsored by Tyne Tees Television, they recorded French music at Abbey Road. He was relentlessly demanding, and his players thought he was right to be; if he ever thought he had given offence, he apologised at once, with his ready smile.

He conducted earlier, and in more places, than his official appointments suggest. In January 1978 he conducted the Orchestre National de France, and on 5 March 1980, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and broadcast live, he conducted it again with Eugene Istomin as soloist in Brahms's Second Concerto. In London the Northern Sinfonia and its chorus sang and played under him in Bach's Magnificat and Mozart's Haffner Serenade on 28 March 1980, sixteen years before he became its artistic director. Dutch listeners first heard him on the podium in 1979, in Utrecht, with Jaime Laredo as soloist; the critic of de Volkskrant, sceptical of pianists who take up the baton, found him technically well equipped and his beat clear and musical. The Limburg Symphony Orchestra, in the south of the Netherlands, had him back for years, and in 1986 he replaced James Conlon in the Rotterdam Philharmonic's Beethoven cycle. After a rehearsal in 1993 he told a Dutch interviewer that, with a soloist, “we are not going to copy”: every good soloist starts from a skeleton of the work, and from there has his freedom.

So, we play together…

Musicians remember that he never played a work the same way twice: every performance brought something new. Above all he had a deep, personal respect for the audience. When a soloist cancelled shortly before a concert, he was not troubled. “So, we play together,” he said, and sat at the keyboard to play the concerto while conducting it himself.

Turin heard him first on 11 and 12 March 1996, in the double role of pianist and conductor. When the orchestra's players were asked which conductors they liked best, two names stood out, Carlo Maria Giulini and this French pianist, whom La Stampa called a revelation on the podium. In January 1997 he conducted Eugene Istomin in Mozart's K. 467, and La Stampa's headline said it in five words: the pupil conducts the master. In June 1997, when Giulini fell ill at rehearsal, Pommier took over the concert that closed the season at the Lingotto, and he was announced as the orchestra's music director for the next. Farther along the coast he conducted the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo in the finals of the Monte-Carlo Piano Masters in 1993, 1995 and 1997.

In 1998, in his second year as the Northern Sinfonia's artistic director, he brought it to the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, on 5 August: Rossini, Chopin's First Concerto played and directed from the keyboard, Mozart's Symphony No. 40 and the London premiere of John Casken's Maharal Dreaming.

He was principal conductor of the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino and of the Sofia Philharmonic, and from 2006 to 2008 artistic director of the Festival de Menton. He conducted the Czech Philharmonic, the Netherlands and Rotterdam Philharmonics, the Residentie Orkest, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the orchestras of Toulouse and Bordeaux, the Philharmonia, the Royal Philharmonic, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg, the MDR orchestra in Leipzig, the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the RAI orchestra in Turin, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the English and Scottish Chamber Orchestras and the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana, often directing concertos from the keyboard. With that Lugano orchestra and the actor Jean Rochefort he filmed Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

“I have conducted all Beethoven's symphonies and overtures,” he said, “but respect for the piano means setting the orchestral imagination aside.” From 1990 he directed the Melbourne Summer Festival. As a conductor he recorded concertos with Michel Dalberto and the Philharmonia Orchestra; their Grieg won a Diapason d'Or. In the 2010s he played and conducted with the Slovak Sinfonietta in Žilina, conducted the Jerusalem Symphony with Idil Biret at the Gabala festival, and in Sofia in December 2015 played and conducted Ravel's G major Concerto at Bulgaria Hall, 52 years after he had first played it in the same city, the night he met Istomin.

In June 2000 he returned to Istomin one last time as a partner: in Budapest he conducted a tribute to Paul Paray, with Istomin as soloist in Paray's Fantasy for piano and orchestra, Beethoven's Third Concerto and Mozart's K. 271. It was Istomin's last large undertaking, and almost none of it was ever issued.

Istomin recorded only selections of Mozart and Beethoven. Pommier wanted both cycles, complete. It was one of the friendly rivalries between them, and he fulfilled it.

He recorded Mozart's sonatas in August 1982 at the Château de Malesherbes, and Mozart's concertos for Virgin Classics with Sinfonia Varsovia, playing and conducting, in the concert hall of the Bydgoszcz Philharmonic in May 1988. His recording of the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas for Erato appeared between 1991 and 1998 and won the Diapason d'Or. Warner reissued it in 2006 as a ten-disc set.

Asked why he played all thirty-two, he said he did not really know. An artist does not choose everything in his life; a piece comes to you, and an invisible guide takes your hand and leads you to it. And then it is like a mountain: you go because it is there. Did he have favourites? It was like a family, he answered: it is hard to prefer one child to another, and yet life makes you live with one more than with another.

For Beethoven, survival is more interesting than life.

He took the Beethoven cycle on stage again and again: at Kings Place in London and in Saint-Émilion in 2008 and 2009, in Brussels in 2013, and in 2015 over eight evenings at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, between March and June. He did not follow the order of composition; the first evening ended with the “Hammerklavier”. “Little by little,” he explained, “I watched the message of time change inside the music. It thickens, widens, contracts, as the things of life grow thin.” At seventy he was, wrote Marie-Aude Roux in Le Monde, still a force of nature, and at the second evening his colleague Michel Dalberto sat among the audience to listen. Reviewing the first evening, the critic Michel Le Naour promised listeners “moments of eternity.”

“For Beethoven,” he said, “survival is more interesting than life. It is a repertoire in which I have never felt the effort, even if it demands athletic gifts.” He played the cycle on his own Steinway, chosen in Hamburg in 1989 from under the nose of Alfred Brendel, who had been looking at the same instrument, a detail he liked to point out with some mischief.

His hands were not large. For Rachmaninov's Second Sonata he rewrote the fingerings to suit them, a solution that impressed Istomin. His recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov concertos, which Istomin had also recorded, were another quiet answer to his friend.

He came to teaching late, and for most of his life kept it private: a few people came to his house from time to time, and that was all. When 1999 was due to be his last official year with the Northern Sinfonia, four of its players would not accept it and found a way to bring him back: Musikè, an international summer school for advanced students and young professionals, which they set up in Durham in 2000. He and four fellow soloists taught violin, viola, cello, oboe and piano and gave chamber concerts for the students. It ran every year for a decade; its first summer, at the Château de La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, was even put on record.

The idea had a forerunner. In 1995, for the twentieth Rencontres musicales d'Évian, Marta Istomin, the festival's general director, asked him to build an orchestra of young musicians. He gathered about ten friends, principals of the national orchestras and senior teachers, among them Maurice Bourgue and Bruno Pasquier, and instead of coaching the eighty students from outside they played among them, as professionals. In Durham the faculty over the years included Bourgue (2000 to 2007), Pasquier, Marco Rizzi, Olivier Charlier, Olga Martinova, Gary Hoffman and Dmitri Yablonsky; in 2001 he directed the six Brandenburg Concertos. The last Durham concerts were on 26 and 29 August 2009, repeated at Kings Place in London on 4 and 5 September, and Musikè UK suspended its activities that month.

Then Rotterdam asked him to help build up its conservatory, and in 2011, in his late sixties, he became principal piano teacher at Codarts, his first commitment to an institution. “In the end it is life that decides,” he said. “Life has to hand you the possibilities.” Teaching, he said, was above all a rich bond with young colleagues, and it completed the circle of being a musician. When David Lively invited him to the École Normale de Musique de Paris Alfred Cortot, where he became a professor in 2018, what moved him, he said, was the invitation itself.

In his lessons he tried to understand not what a student expected from him, but what the student expected from himself: their quest, their inner necessity. He spoke of transmission as something absolutely crucial: Bach went to see Buxtehude, Beethoven went to see Haydn. And he could make a room go quiet. A reporter who sat in on a lesson in Rotterdam watched a young woman play Chopin, brilliantly, with a piano that would not sing. “Are you afraid?” he asked. “Don't you take yourself seriously?” She began again, and this time the sound filled the room.

He taught and gave masterclasses in Chicago, London, Lausanne, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Vienna, Melbourne and Shanghai. He sat on juries too; as a young man at the regional conservatoire of Poitiers he examined, with Michel Béroff and André Gorog, a student called Jean-Pierre Rousseau, who later ran the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège and the Radio France festival in Montpellier, and wrote the memory down again on the day Pommier died.

In the end it is life that decides. Life has to hand you the possibilities.

At home in the Languedoc he had founded, in 1978, the association A.M.A., which still runs his festival. In the early 2010s, living between Amsterdam, Saint Petersburg and Cazouls-lès-Béziers, he agreed to preside, unpaid, over the Théâtre des Franciscains in Béziers, succeeding Jérôme Savary. He founded the Festival Piano Prestige, held in Cazouls-lès-Béziers, with free concerts, young musicians and the historic pianos of the Fondation René Portes, among them an instrument that had belonged to Maurice Ravel. He was still playing and conducting there in October 2025; Philippe Cassard played under his baton that autumn.

He also loved the meeting of words and music. With the writer and broadcaster Olivier Bellamy he devised “Colette et la musique”, Bellamy reading Colette's writings on music while Pommier answered at the piano in Fauré, Debussy and Ravel; they gave it at the Abbaye de l'Épau in 2015, in Arradon in 2016 and in Toulouse in 2018. The concert, Bellamy said, had been Pommier's own idea.

His wife, the violinist Olga Martinova, born in Leningrad and a former concertmaster of the Netherlands Philharmonic, was also his musical partner. They played the Beethoven violin sonatas together and taught side by side. Asked what keeps a musician growing, she spoke of the soil that feeds you, and named him as that soil: hours and hours of playing together and talking about music without end, and not always agreeing, until the music itself showed what had to be done.

He was a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and an Officier of the Ordre national du Mérite. He never made compromises and accepted what that cost him. Of his own path, he said he had no regrets. At seventy he was more optimistic than he had been at fifty, because audiences, he felt, at last had ears connected to the heart.

Jean-Bernard Pommier died on 23 April 2026 at Boujan-sur-Libron, near Béziers, after a long illness. He was eighty-one. He is survived by Olga Martinova and his two daughters.