Jean-Bernard Pommier was born at Béziers on 17 August 1944, the son of an organist, began the piano at four and gave his first public concert at seven, taking lessons in Béziers from the Russian-trained Mina Koslova; his father introduced him to Pablo Casals. At fourteen he moved to Paris to study privately with Yves Nat, as Nat’s last pupil, then at the Conservatoire with Pierre Sancan, taking conducting with Eugène Bigot, and later worked with Eugene Istomin in New York. He died at Boujan-sur-Libron on 23 April 2026.

He won the Berlin Young Musicians International Competition in 1960 and in 1962, at seventeen, was the youngest finalist at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, taking an honourable mention from a jury chaired by Emil Gilels. He met Istomin in Sofia in 1963 after playing Ravel’s G major Concerto for the first time; Istomin described the relationship that followed as a dialogue between colleagues rather than teaching, and the two performed and recorded together for over forty years. He began recording for EMI after the Tchaikovsky Competition and became known for Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff; as a conductor he led the Northern Sinfonia, the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino and the Sofia Philharmonic, directed the Festival de Menton from 2006 to 2008, and from 2018 was a professor at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Bernard_Pommier
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2038036