Ivan Ilić was born at Palo Alto, California, on 14 August 1978, to a Serbian family, and read both mathematics and music at the University of California, Berkeley. After a short period at the San Francisco Conservatory he went to Paris for graduate study, taking a premier prix at the Conservatoire de Paris and continuing at the École Normale de Musique; his teachers in France were François-René Duchâble, Christian Ivaldi and Jacques Rouvier. He lives in Paris.

His recording of Debussy’s twenty-four Préludes, issued by Paraty in October 2008, won Mezzo TV’s Critics’ Choice Award in France and drew argument for his decision to reorder the pieces, a choice he defended in print. He followed it with Godowsky’s left-hand Studies on Chopin’s Études, named Classical CD of the Week by The Daily Telegraph, and has since built a discography out of repertoire other pianists leave alone: Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus, a Scriabin-Feldman-Cage-Wollschleger programme, Haydn symphonies in Carl David Stegmann’s keyboard transcriptions, and three Chandos volumes of the almost unrecorded piano music of Antoine Reicha. He has played at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Glenn Gould Studio and Ireland’s National Concert Hall.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ili%C4%87_(pianist)
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q457029