Christina Petrowska Quilico

The Canadian Encyclopedia calls Christina Petrowska Quilico, C.M., O.Ont, FRSC, “one of Canada’s most celebrated pianists. Equally adept at Classical, Romantic and Contemporary repertoires… she is also a noted champion of Canadian composers.” She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2020 “for her celebrated career as a classical and contemporary pianist, and for championing Canadian music” and to the Order of Ontario in 2022 “for opening the ears of music lovers through her performances and recordings, her teaching at York University and her establishment of The Christina and Louis Quilico Award at the Ontario Arts Foundation and Canadian Opera Company.” She was also inducted in 2021 into the Royal Society of Canada, “the country’s highest honour an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences.” In September 2023, the Ontario Arts Council named her winner of its Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance for having “reached a degree of international attention through appearances in other countries, and/or through broadcast and recordings.” 

Previous distinctions include the Friends of Canadian Music Award from the Canadian Music Centre and Canadian League of Composers, and being selected as one of the CMC’s Ambassadors of Canadian Music. The CBC chose her as one of “20 Can’t-Miss Classical Pianists” and one of “Canada’s 25 best classical pianists,” and inducted her into its “In Concert Hall of Fame” celebrating the greatest Canadian classical musicians of all time, past and present. At York University, where she taught for 35 years, she is a Professor Emerita, Senior Scholar, and for three consecutive years was a recipient of the university’s highly prized Research Awards, and one of only two in 2023 given Distinguished Honors as “outstanding contributors to their fields and beyond.” 

Among Quilico’s output of more than 50 CDs are 19 concertos, and solo and chamber works by contemporary and international composers, many of them women — most notably Canada’s Ann Southam, whose music she has recorded on five Centrediscs albums, comprising eight discs. Four of her CDs have earned JUNO Awards nominations, three of them for concerto CDs, and one for Southam’s cycle Glass Houses Revisited, which is Centrediscs’ all-time best seller and was named one of “30 best Canadian classical recordings ever” by CBC Music. 

The pandemic years have seen other new accomplishments and accolades given to this musician described as a “piano wizard” (Take Effect) and “the towering Canadian piano virtuoso” (The WholeNote), and praised for her “commanding pianism” (American Record Guide), “intelligent programme” (Gramophone), and her “ability to leave a permanent impression on the listener’s soul” (Sonograma Magazine, Barcelona) for her three solo albums on Navona Records. VINTAGE AMERICANA made a number of 2021’s best-of lists in Canada and abroad. She was also featured on Parisa Sabet’s A Cup of Sins (Redshift Records) and Alice Ping Yee Ho’s solo piano album Blaze — the latter appearing in spring 2023 on Centrediscs, as did Shadow & Light, an album of three double concertos by Ho and fellow Canadians Larysa Kuzmenko and Christos Hatzis, recorded with violinist Marc Djokic and Sinfonia Toronto conducted by Nurhan Arman. In March 2023 she gave the Toronto-area premiere of the Florence Price Piano Concerto, with the York Chamber Ensemble and conductor Michael Berec. On October 21, Quilico joined Maestro Kristian Alexander in the Piano Concerto and the Paganini Variations by Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, celebrating his 110th anniversary, in the Kindred Spirits Orchestra’s gala season opener. She will be recording More Rivers, a solo piano suite written for her by Frank Horvat and funded, along with further projects relating to music and the environment, by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. 

After making her orchestral debut at 10, playing the Haydn D major concerto with Toronto’s Conservatory Orchestra, Quilico studied on scholarship at New York’s Juilliard School under the legendary Rosina Lhévinne. Co-winning a concerto prize at age 15 with pianist Murray Perahia, she was called “a promethean talent” by the New York Times. She continued to give solo and chamber recitals at many of the city’s venerated recital halls including Carnegie, Alice Tully, and Merkin halls, garnering superlatives from the New York Times critics, who deemed her “an extraordinary talent with phenomenal ability…dazzling virtuosity,” playing Olivier Messiaen “to perfection.” 

Studies followed at the Sorbonne in Paris, and with Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti in Darmstadt and Berlin. Pierre Boulez coached her in two of his sonatas, which are featured on her 2021 Navona Records album SOUND VISIONARIES (“This primer of twentieth century French piano music gets better with each repeated listen.” – Pianomania, Singapore). She has traveled widely, performing more than 53 concertos — from Bach and Haydn to present-day composers — with orchestras across Canada and in the United States, and in Greece and Taipei. Besides those countries, recitals have taken her to England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Her ancestry is mostly Polish, but also a mix of Slovak, Ukrainian, German, Welsh, Danish, and Swedish.