Romanian pianist Alexandra Dăriescu makes BBC Proms debut this week

Romanian pianist Alexandra Dăriescu will perform at the BBC Proms, the summer classical music festival held annually at Royal Albert Hall and other venues across the United Kingdom, this week.

She is the first Romanian female pianist to perform at the festival, joining a very small group of Romanian pianists to have appeared at the well-known event, namely the late Radu Lupu and Mîndru Katz.

Dăriescu’s concert will take place on August 5, at Royal Albert Hall, alongside the Hallé Orchestra, with Kahchun Wong conducting.

She will perform Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra by Nadia Boulanger, a work receiving its BBC Proms premiere. The choice of repertoire reflects Dăriescu’s “longstanding commitment to rediscovering and promoting works that remain underrepresented in the international concert repertoire, particularly those by women composers,” a release from the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) explains. Throughout her career, she has championed music by Nadia Boulanger, Clara Schumann, Dora Pejačević, Leokadiya Kashperova and Doreen Carwithen, alongside the major works of the piano repertoire.

The program also features Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27, as well as Maurice Ravel's La vallée des cloches in an orchestration by Colin Matthews.

Alexandra Dăriescu made her debut in Iași at the age of nine with the National Orchestra of Moldova. At 17, she moved to the UK to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. She settled in the UK, becoming a British citizen and establishing an international career.

A major career milestone came with her debut at Royal Albert Hall in 2013. She has performed with leading orchestras including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Her advocacy for greater representation of women composers led to the creation of the Alexandra Dăriescu Award at the Leeds International Piano Competition, the first prize of its kind recognizing the performance of a work composed by a woman. In 2017, she created and produced the multimedia performance The Nutcracker and I, combining piano music, dance and digital animation. The production has been staged more than 100 times across Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States.

She has received numerous distinctions, including the title of Cultural Ambassador of Romania, the Order of the Crown of Romania in the rank of Officer, awarded by the Romanian Royal Family, and the Young European Leader distinction from Friends of Europe. In 2020, she was awarded Romania's Order of Cultural Merit in the rank of Knight and became an Associate of the Royal Northern College of Music, where she also taught piano for two years. Since September 2024, she has been a professor of Piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.