ÍøÆغÚÁÏ

The recordings of pianist Shani Diluka, featuring choice performances of Romantic and post-Romantic repertory, have garnered an unusual number of prizes. She also plays contemporary music.

Diluka was born to Sri Lankan parents on November 7, 1976, in Monaco. As a child, she won admittance to a program spearheaded by Monaco's Princess Grace that allowed children with special talents to receive dedicated music lessons as part of their regular school classes. Diluka enrolled at Monaco's Academie de Musique, maintained by the Fondation Prince Rainier III, and received a first prize there. She studied with pianist Odile Poisson and then entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1997. Her main teachers there were Georges Pludermacher and François-Frédéric Guy, but she also studied with Marie-Françoise Bucquet, Nicholas Angelich, and Bruno Rigutto, and she won another first prize at her graduation. Diluka benefited from further studies with a variety of the world's top pianists. Primary among these was Leon Fleisher, whom she counts as a musical and philosophical mentor; she also worked with Maria João Pires, Menahem Pressler, and Murray Perahia, and in 2005 with Martha Argerich at the latter's Lake Como Piano Academy.

Diluka has appeared at major venues, including the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Chicago area's Ravinia Festival. Her first album, Concertos et Pièces Lyriques de Grieg, was released on the Mirare label in 2007 and earned several awards and five-star reviews, including France's CHOC du monde de la musique. That set a pattern for Diluka's recording career, which has seen the pianist earn numerous awards and recommendations from music publications. After several more albums for Mirare, including the mostly American recital Road 66, she backed singer-narrator Natalie Dessay on the children's Christmas album Babar et le père Noël. Diluka has maintained her connections with the musical culture of the Indian subcontinent, and for her first album for Warner Classics in 2020, she issued Cosmos, which fused the music of Beethoven with Indian ragas and was grounded in the fact that Beethoven was documented to have been familiar with the first German translation of the Hindu Upanishads in 1816. She followed up that release in 2021 with The Proust Album, featuring music novelist Marcel Proust admired and was issued in advance of the centenary of Proust's death in 1922. In addition to performing music, Diluka is also a noted poet who has been honored by the Académie Française. ~ James Manheim