Ramzi Yassa

The first Arab pianist to record Beethoven's piano concertos (Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Ahmed El Saedi), Ramzi Yassa has performed in halls as renowned as the Vienna's Musikverein, the Berliner Philharmonie, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Barbican Centre, the Royal Albert Hall or the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Forbidden City Concert Hall, the Biblioteca Alexandrina, and in Egypt’s New Capital Opera in 2021, collaborating with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Charles Groves, Yehudi Menuhin, Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Alexander Sladkovsky, as well as other major Egyptian conductors.

Yassa teaches at the École Normale de Musique "Alfred Cortot" in Paris, where he currently resides. He is a recipient of the Liszt Centennial Commemorative Medal as well as the 2007 Egyptian Merit State Prize for Music, for the first time awarded to a performing musician.

Ramzi Yassa (Arabic: رمزى يسى; born 1948) is an Egyptian pianist. Born in Cairo, Yassa is an outstanding member of the first batch of musicians trained at the Cairo Conservatory. Yassa then joined the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow in the class of Sergei Dorensky, where he earned an Honorary certificate after taking part in the 1974 Tchaikovsky competition. He then launched a concert career, settling in Paris. In 1977, he was the first Egyptian pianist to win a major piano competition—the 'Paloma O'Shea' Santander International Piano Competition.