Top 17 Famous Pianists In History

Tigran Hamasyan is a Jazz pianist and composer hailing from Armenia. Hamasyan has over 201K monthly listeners on Spotify.

Born in what is now known as Gyumri, Armenia, on July 17, 1987, to a father who was a jeweler and a mother who designed clothes, Hamasyan’s music is heavily inspired by the folk tradition of his home country.

The pianist initially dreamed of being a thrash metal guitarist but changed his genre after he started studying jazz at the age of nine. As he grew more prominent in the instrument, he started incorporating local folk melodies into his music by transforming them into jazz improvisations.

Over the course of his successful career, the 35-year-old pianist has won over 10 prestigious awards from 2002 to 2016 including an ECHO Jazz Award and a 1st prize Prix de la Critique et du Public win at the Concours de Piano du Montreux Jazz Festival. His discography includes eleven albums with the most recent album, StandArt, being released in 2022.

Jesus Molina is a Jazz pianist hailing from Sincelejo, Colombia. Molina has over 248K monthly listeners on Spotify.

Born on June 1, 1996, Molina is a piano prodigy who started composing songs at the age of four. A deeply religious person, Molina has credited growing up in Christian churches with helping him gain inspiration for his music.

Aside from the piano, the musician also knows how to play the saxophone, which he regularly used in church services. For a time in his mid-teens, the youth was focusing on the saxophone more than the piano but quickly decided to focus his energies on the latter.

His skills got him admittance to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where he also currently resides. The musician is best known for his music YouTube channel where he posts his music, covers, and music videos and has garnered over 230K subscribers as of the writing of this article.

Cory Henry is a singer, songwriter, organist, and pianist from America. He has over 353K monthly listeners on Spotify.

A multi-instrumentalist aside from the piano Henry knows how to play the organ, keyboards, drums, and a harpejji. He also sings and is best known for formerly being a member of the grammy award-winning instrumental jazz fusion band, Snarky Puppy.

Henry has been a solo artist since 2018 when he released his first independent release, Art of Love. However, he did have two releases beforehand in 2014 and 2016.

Since 2018’s Art of Love, Henry has released four more studio albums and a live album. However, his best work has been behind the scenes as he has worked with famed producer Quincy Jones in his curated Soundtrack of America series and for the famous controversial rapper Kanye West on his tenth studio album Donda, for which Henry, alongside many co-producers, has been nominated for a Grammy.

Domi is a French Keyboardist currently based in Dallas, Texas. She has over 575K monthly listeners on Spotify. 

Domi is best known as one half of the jazz duo DOMi & JD BECK with American drummer JD Beck. The two met in 2018, in Dallas, Texas, and since have worked with various famous and legendary musicians like Anderson .Paak, Thundercat, Bruno Mars, and Herbie Hancock to name a few. 

As for Domi herself, she was born Domitille Degalle in France. A young prodigy, Domi started playing piano, keyboards, and drums at the young age of 3. 

Two years later, her guardians enrolled her in the Conservatoire to study Jazz and classical music. Her talent would lead her to study at the Conservatoire de Paris and eventually the Berklee College of Music for which she would move to America and eventually meet JD Beck, thus starting her now Grammy-nominated music career.

Brad Mehladu is a Jazz pianist, arranger, and composer hailing from Jacksonville, Florida. He has over 617K monthly listeners on Spotify.

Born on August 23, 1970, to an ophthalmologist and homemaker, Mehladu was drawn to the piano due to the fact that his family always had a piano in the household. He would learn the instrument by copying the pop and rock tunes that he heard on the radio.

The future pianist initially only knew how to play simple pop and rock tunes, but when the family moved to West Hartford, Connecticut when he was ten, his family sent him to a piano teacher. The teacher introduced him to classical music which would color his interests for much of his early teens.

However, Mehladu would eventually fall in love with jazz around his mid-teens and since then has been a devotee of the genre. He has a deep discography that contains over 40 records with him leading the helm and countless more as a sideman.

Yuja Wang is an acclaimed classical pianist hailing from Beijing, China. She has well over 766K monthly listeners on Spotify.

Born to an artistic family on February 10, 1987, Wang’s father is a percussionist and her mother is a dancer. Wang too is a prodigy who started studying the piano at the young age of six.

Her talents would lead to her joining the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing just a year after she started studying piano. In three short years, she would enter the Morningside Music Bridge International Music Festival at age 11, the festival’s youngest student.

Her talents would only be recognized more as she grew up and at 15, she joined Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music where she studied with esteemed classical piano teacher Gary Graffman, who personally taught her for five years until she graduated in 2008. She was already an internationally recognized concert pianist at the age of 21.

Widely considered the greatest pianist, Martha Argerich is an Argentine classical concert pianist. She has over 1.1 million monthly Spotify listeners.

Born on June 5, 1941, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Agrerich’s parents have Spanish and Jewish ancestry. The premier prodigy, Argerich was a precocious child who entered kindergarten at the age of two years and eight months. 

Teased by a five-year-old boy, a friend of hers, that she couldn’t play the piano, Argerich proceeded to play a piece their teacher had just played to prove him wrong. The teacher who’d heard her play immediately called her parents who made her start playing the piano at age three.

Two years later, she started studying personally with esteemed Italian pianist Vincenzo Scaramuzza. Argerich gave her debut concert at the age of eight, and since then has gone on to dazzle the world with her skills that put her in the same conversation as Rachmaninoff.

Valentina Lisita is a Ukranian-American classical pianist who has been active since 1977. She has over 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Born in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine back when it was still a part of the Soviet Union in 1970 to a seamstress and an Engineer, Lisitsa started playing piano at the young age of three. She started playing her first solo recital the next year at age four.

Despite being a young talent in the piano she did not take the instrument seriously until she went to study at the Kyiv Conservatory where she met her future husband Alexei Kuznetsoff. Meeting Kunzetsoff made her make music much more seriously.

However, the pianist gained worldwide fame through an unconventional means, YouTube, when she posted her first video in 2007 and gained fame, especially for playing Chopin’s Etudes. Since then she has continued using social media to reach her fans and display her musical talents.

Daniil Trifonov is a pianist and composer hailing from Russia. He has over 1.490 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Despite only being 31 years old, Trifonov has been hailed as one of the leading classical virtuosos of today. His accolades are far from few as he has a Grammy, a gramophone Classical Music award, and has performed with many esteemed orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lonon Symphony Orchestra, and many more.

Like many on this list, he started playing the piano at a young age, at age five, and performed his first recital at the age of seven. He quickly gained acclaim as he grew up, and gained more so as he started diversifying his music from his early obsession with Frederic Chopin.

As of the writing of this article, Trifonov has released over 9 studio albums, 3 live albums, and 1 compilation.

Jon Batiste is a grammy winning American singer, songwriter, and bandleader. He has over 1.489 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Batiste recently gained a lot of acclaims when his album, We Are, won five awards at the 2022 Grammy Awards, including the Album of the Year. However, he has been active in the music industry since 1998, releasing music and working on various other endeavors.

Some of his many claims to fame have been working with various artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to Ed Sheeran, to being the musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from 2015 to 2022, and working on the Pixar animated movie, Soul.

Despite his commercial and critical acclaim, the most relevant part about Batiste in terms of this list is the fact that he is a fabulous pianist and keyboardist. It is his instrument of choice, and the singer often plays it when he performs. 

Khatia Buniatishvili is a concert pianist hailing from Georgia. She has over 1.751 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

She was born in Batumi, Georgia on July 21, 1987, and started playing the piano when her mother began teaching her at the age of three. The future concert pianist took to the lessons well and started performing concerts at the age of 6 nationally and internationally at the age of 10. 

Interestingly, Buniatishvili isn’t the only pianist in her family as her sister Gvantsa Buniatishvili is also an accomplished pianist. As for Khatia, she improved upon her skills by studying personally with talented teachers like Tengiz Amirejibi and Oleg Maisenberg.

Her talent led her to sign with Sony Classical in 2010 and since then she has released over eight albums as of the writing of this article. Most of her albums have been solo piano albums, with one being with a French orchestra.

A veritable jazz legend, Herbie Hancock is an American jazz pianist, keyboardist, and composer. He has over 1.778 million Spotify monthly listens.

Starting his career under other Jazz legends like Donald Byrd and Mile Davis, Hancock came into his own when he started fusing jazz with other, more contemporary sounds like sunk and electro. His most famous and influential album, Head Hunters, was born as a result of his many experiments.

Hancock has gone on to have a highly critically lauded career, with his 2007 tribute album to Joni Mitchell, River: The Joni Letters winning Album of the Year at that year’s Grammy Awards, being only the second jazz album since Getz/Gilberto in 1965 to win the prestigious award.

Since 2012, Hancock has worked as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2019, the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz renamed itself the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, where he also serves as the chairman.

Prodigy and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier hails from London, England. Collier has over 2.03 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Born on August 2, 1994, Collier is a music prodigy who is known for combining elements of jazz with various other musical genres featuring his staggering knowledge of reharmonization and close harmony. He is also known for his captivating live performances where he gets the audience to perform with him by singing part harmonies and/or percussions. 

He first gained prominence in 2012 when he did a split-screen cover of Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing which went viral on YouTube. This led to him being signed by legendary music producer Quincy Jones himself.

Collier has gone on to win a Grammy Award for each of his four albums and has also worked behind the scenes, most prominently producing R&B artist SZA’s comeback single, Good Days. 

A pianist, producer, songwriter, and arranger, Robert Glasper hails from America. He has over 2.4 million Spotify monthly listeners.

A highly critically acclaimed artist, Glasper has won four Grammy awards and seen nominations in eight categories. Aside from his own work, he is best known for his keyboard work in the seminal jazz rap album To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar, for which he also won a Grammy.

However, Glasper is best known for his extensive touring as the man has toured globally and has amassed a large and loyal international following due to it. He has also played in various international festivals like the Carnegie Hall and the London Jazz Festival to name a few. 

Glasper continues to work with many different artists ranging from rap legends like Kendrick Lamar and Talib Kweli to jazz legends like Herbie Hancock and Bilal.

Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang is widely hailed as an accomplished classical musician. He has over 4 million Spotify monthly listeners.

He started playing the piano at age 2 after being inspired by an episode of the cartoon Tom & Jerry called The Cat Concerto, where they played Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. To that end, he started taking lessons from Zhu Ya-Fen at age three and performed his first concert at age five.

However, failure would follow as he was expelled from his tutor’s studio at age 9 dude to a lack of talent. However, he had simply lost inspiration and gained it back when another teacher asked him to play a Mozart piece, which reminded him of his passion.

Since then, Lang has become one of China’s premier concert pianists and has played all over the world. His discography includes 9 studio albums and 4 live albums.

Stevie Wonder, quite simply, is one of the greatest R&B and soul singers of all time. He has over 16.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Best known for being a hell of a singer, musician, and especially a pianist despite being blind, Wonder has been playing music since a child and even signed to a label at only 11 years old.

Wonder has his first number 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 at only 13 years old and has made some of the most acclaimed albums in the soul genre with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fullfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life. Those last three albums all won a Grammy for Album of the year.

Simply put, Stevie Wonder may not be the best pianist of all time, but he is by far one of the most famous and beloved figures to ever touch the black and white keys, with one exception.

Sir Elton John is one of the most successful and famous artists of all time. He has well over 47.6 million Spotify monthly listeners.

Best known for his collaborations with lyricist Bernie Taupin, their partnership meant Taupin would write the words and John would imbue them with life with his amazing voice and amazing piano playing skills.

The singer has sold over 300 million records globally and is acclaimed critically and commercially for his work, especially in the 70s. He is a beloved figure who has crossed the boundaries of music to be known by popular culture at large.

John is one of, if not the most recognized piano player in all of rock music. He is still making hits, with his most recent one coming out in 2021, making him the first solo artist to have top 10 hits in six different decades in the UK.