Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland and winner of the Swiss Grand Prix and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, has earned renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the avant-jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades.

Few artists feel truly at ease in both concert halls and jazz clubs, playing improvised or composed music. But Courvoisier — “a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise,” according to The New York Times — is as compelling when performing Stravinsky’s epochal Rite of Spring in league with new-music pianist Cory Smythe as she is when improvising with her own acclaimed jazz trio, featuring bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen or in solo.

Then there are her ear-opening collaborations with such luminaries as John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Ned Rothenberg, Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Mark Feldman, Christian Fennesz, Nate Wooley and Mary Halvorson.

In music as in life, Courvoisier crosses borders with a creative spirit and a free mind; her music-making is as playful as it is intense, as steeped in tradition as it is questing and intrepid. NPR’s Kevin Whitehead has encapsulated her art in an evocative way: “Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier treats it like a playground.”

Courvoisier’s new ensemble — the atmospheric, shape-shifting Chimaera — toured across Europe from July to September 2024, performing music from Courvoisier’s double-disc Chimaera album, released in November 2023 via the Swiss label Intakt. The virtuoso touring group features Christian Fennesz on electric guitar/effects, Nate Wooley and wadada Leo Smith on trumpets and Gress on double-bass alongside a pair of percussionists: Nasheet Waits on drums and Wollesen on both drums and vibraphone. Courvoisier has played notably in the Big Apple and beyond with Wooley and Waits, while Gress and Wollesen are the longtime partners in her aforementioned trio. Chimaera’s wildcard is Fennesz, the Austrian artist known for his ambient-textured work both solo and in league with such figures as the late, great composer-pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto and avant-pop icon David Sylvian. The Chimaera project presents a reverie of sound unlike any Courvoisier has crafted before: spacious and shimmering, mysterious and mesmerizing.

Sylvie Courvoisier’s ace foursome Amalthea, her newest band — formerly known as Poppy Seeds — will embark on its second tour of Europe from April 24 to May 10, 2026, supporting the group’s debut studio album, recorded for Pyroclastic Records in spring 2025. This quartet features one of today’s great bass and drum combinations, Thomas Morgan and Dan Weiss, as well as rising vibraphonist Patricia Brennan. Reviewing the band’s concert at JazzFest Berlin last year, All About Jazz said: “The quartet allowed full rein to Courvoisier’s propulsive drive without sacrificing the complexity and risk-taking that makes her work so enthralling. Brennan’s playing involved unisons, solos of sparkling notes grounded by a deeper clang, or subtle pitch-bending electronics. Morgan and Weiss meshed both in jazzy pulse and discontinuous meter. But Courvoisier remained an engaging focal point, deploying rubbed piano sighs, poltergeist knocks and flamboyant crashes alongside passages of astounding feeling.” 

She is a part time faculty at the New School in NYC since January 2020, teaching ensembles  and privately . Since 15 years, she gave master classes all over Europe, and taught ensembles at the Jazz and Contemporary Schools in Luzern, Basel, Zurich and Bern.