Lahav Shani

Born in Tel Aviv in 1989, Lahav Shani began his first piano lessons at the age of six. He later studied with Arie Vardi at the Buchmann-Mehta Music School in his native city and completed his education at the Hanns Eisler Music Academy in Berlin... Read more

Born in Tel Aviv in 1989, Lahav Shani began his first piano lessons at the age of six. He later studied with Arie Vardi at the Buchmann-Mehta Music School in his native city and completed his education at the Hanns Eisler Music Academy in Berlin, where he studied conducting with Christian Ehwald and piano with Fabio Bidini. Already during this time, Daniel Barenboim was acting as his mentor. Shani won the Mahler Competition for young conductors in Bamberg in 2013. It signaled the start of his international career. He was associated with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra as Principal Guest Conductor from 2017 until 2020 and has been at the helm of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra as Principal Conductor since 2018, having already extended his contract until 2026; since 2020, he has also been acting as Music Director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. As a guest artist, Shani has worked with the London and Boston Symphony Orchestras, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Still active as a pianist, he has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouworkest, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, among others, from the keyboard. With the Staatskapelle Berlin, he has performed Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto under the baton of Daniel Barenboim. In the fall of 2020, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in a Schumann-Mozart program. Shani is also a passionate chamber musician and has performed in this capacity at the Aix-en-Provence and Verbier Festivals, among others. With Renaud Capuçon and Kian Soltani, he released an album of piano trios by Tchaikovsky and Dvořák in 2019. He recorded Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in 2020.