An Argentine pianist and composer based in France, Pablo Murgier studied jazz without claiming to be a "jazzman", trained in composition without calling himself a "contemporary composer", and went deep into classical music while taking apart its codes. His solo piano turns on one question, who is music for, and listens for what doesn't shout: what rustles, what fades, what holds on at the edges.
His album Sirocco (2026) sets original pieces beside his own versions of Piazzolla, David Bowie, Björk, Agustín Barrios and Violeta Parra. Recorded in the Alps, with no studio and no schedule: music from the here and now. Coming up: Elbphilharmonie Hamburg (Kleiner Saal), February 2027.
The Pablo Murgier Trio, with Romain Lécuyer (double bass) and Miguel Couto (drums), works firmly in the margins. Jazz becomes a space of emancipation here, each note a way of inhabiting the present. The group explores singular sonic territories, fed by new compositions and by inspirations drawn from Sakamoto, Björk or Led Zeppelin, crossed by the music of South America and by imaginations that open new narratives: those of Alfred Hitchcock, Baptiste Morizot or Alice Zeniter.
The group was born in 2017 in Buenos Aires before settling in Paris. Three records mark its path: Muy Lejos (2017, nominated for the Gardel Awards, first prize at the Tango Sin Fin Awards), the EP Reflets (2020) and Gare du Sud (2022), a language that, record after record, has moved towards contemporary jazz and contemporary classical music, with the detail of chamber writing and the directness of popular music. The trio has performed at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, Jamboree in Barcelona, Café Berlín in Madrid, New Morning in Paris, Cosmopolite in Oslo and Fasching in Stockholm. Today, Pablo Murgier is refining that language around writing and improvisation.
As a composer and soloist with orchestra, Pablo Murgier Pazdera premiered his first symphony, Solastalgie, in 2024, a piece on eco-anxiety performed and choreographed with the Avallon Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra, which he continues to expand with a view to an official recording with orchestra. He wrote and plays an original arrangement of Piazzolla's Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas for solo piano and symphony orchestra, and performs Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23. In 2023 he appeared with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse.
- Solastalgie, symphony (2024)
- Astor Piazzolla, Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, arrangement for solo piano and orchestra
- Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23
- Classical repertoire and reimagined works for solo piano
Frapper l'Épopée: a staged musical reading between Pablo Murgier, who composed the music and plays it at the piano, and the writer Alice Zeniter (Prix Goncourt des lycéens), after her novel Frapper l'épopée (Flammarion, 2024). Spoken text and piano don't illustrate each other: they move together, cut in, hand off.
Piano and violin: two written-and-improvised voices between tango, jazz and chamber music, close and conversational. Original pieces by both and chosen reworkings.
Pablo Murgier (piano) with Mathias Eick (trumpet), Tora Augestad (voice) and Karl Espegard (violin). Argentine tango roots read through a Nordic chamber-jazz sensibility: open textures, space, restraint.
Tora Augestad, voice · Mathias Eick, trumpet · Pablo Murgier, piano · Karl Espegard, violin
