Born in Trieste (Italy), Rinaldo Zhok received from his mother his first piano lessons at the age of seven. Until he was 18 he studied in the Conservatorio Giuseppe Tartini in Trieste with Clara Lenuzza, to whom he owes much of his education. He trained as a soloist with Sergio Perticaroli and Stefano Fiuzzi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Roma and at the Folkwang Universität in Essen (Germany) with Boris Bloch. As a pianist and with different chamber ensembles, he studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich with the famous duo Yaara Tal & Andreas Groethuysen and at the Scuola Superiore Internazionale di Musica da Camera del Trio de Trieste with Dario De Rosa, Renato Zanettovich and Enrico Bronzi. He completed studies in harpsichord and pedagogy at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Navarra. He also had important contact with the maestros Lazar Berman, Aldo Ciccolini, Pier Narciso Masi, Mauro Minguzzi and Riccardo Zadra. He has undertaken many concerts in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Norway as soloist, as well as in chamber formations and with orchestra, with excellent reception on the part of both audiences and critics. He was awarded a prize at the “Halina Czerny-Stefańska in memoriam” International Piano Competition (Poznan, 2008) and at the International Piano Competition “Performance Without Limits” (Łódź, 2013). From 2013, he records with the Odradek Records label, beginning with an album of Franz Liszt’s paraphrases and transcriptions on the music of Giuseppe Verdi. He later made a world-premiere recording of the music for piano by Spanish composer Jesús García Leoz. From 2014 he has partnered the Portuguese pianist Artur Pizarro forming a duo; they have recorded Dvořák’s From the Bohemian Forest & Dumky as well as Boundless, Beethoven’s entire piano works for four hands. His broad knowledge of vocal repertoire and his adaptability in piano accompaniment have made him a model in the training of interpretation for voice, while he has also been working on the recovery and publication of the voice repertoire of Navarre in the 19th century.
