Karl Lutchmayer

Karl Lutchmayer is equally renowned as a concert pianist and a lecturer. The first Steinway Artist of Indian origin, Karl performs across the globe, and has worked with conductors including Lorin Maazel and Sir Andrew Davis, and performed at all the major London concert halls.

He has broadcast on BBC Television and Radio, All India Radio and Classic FM, and is a regular chamber performer. A passionate advocate of contemporary music, has also given over 90 world premieres and had many works written especially for him.

Best known in the UK for his London lecture-recital series, Conversational Concerts, which garners critical and public acclaim, his landmark concerts celebrating the Liszt and Alkan bicentenaries, resulted in invitations from 4 continents to give concerts and lecture-recitals. He has also been part of the team introducing the London Prom concerts for BBC television and memorably curated and performed in a three-day festival of the music of Busoni in London, including a performance of the Piano Concerto for which he received extensive media attention. Additionally, his 2025 recording of Busoni’s solo and duo piano music for Chandos in collaboration with Peter Donohoe received wide critical acclaim.

Karl was a professor for 15 years at Trinity Laban (formerly Trinity College of Music) in Greenwich, and has been a regular guest lecturer at conservatoires and universities around the world, including the Juilliard and Manhattan Schools in New York and the University of Oxford. Additionally, for the last decade Karl has focussed much of his time and attention on nurturing the burgeoning Western Classical music scene in India, his family home. It was for this education work that he was awarded the Bharat Gaurav (Pride of India) Lifetime Achievement award in 2015 and the Indians of the World Medal in June 2022.

Karl studied the piano and trumpet at the Junior Department of Trinity College of Music, then at the Royal College of Music where he was awarded the Hopkinson Medal by Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. He then undertook further studies with Lev Naumov at the Moscow Conservatoire. Additionally he holds an MPhil in Musicology from The University of Oxford and a PhD in Musicology at The University of Cambridge.