Biography
Biography (fr)
The Canadian Encyclopedia calls Christina Petrowska Quilico, C.M., O.Ont, FRSC, “one of Canada’s most celebrated pianists. She was invested into the Order of Canada “for her celebrated career as a classical and contemporary pianist, and for championing Canadian music.” She was appointed to The Order of Ontario “for opening the ears of music lovers through her performances and recordings, her teaching at York University and her establishment of The Christina and Louis Quilico Award at the Ontario Arts Foundation and Canadian Opera Company.”
She was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, “the country’s highest honor an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences.” When the Ontario Arts Council bestowed on her its prestigious Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance, the jurors praised her “astonishing contribution to musical life in Canada.” As they remarked: “Christina is a champion of Canadian composers – and her pioneering dedication to Canadian female composers is especially noteworthy. She has helped to secure this period of Canadian music through her impressive catalogue of recordings, and further through the ripple effect of her many students. She is steadfast. She is legend.”
She also holds the Friends of Canadian Music Award from the Canadian Music Centre and Canadian League of Composers and is one of the CMC’s Ambassadors of Canadian Music. After choosing her as one of 20 Can’t-Miss Classical Pianists and one of The 25 best Canadian classical pianists, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation inducted her into its In Concert Hall of Fame celebrating the greatest Canadian classical musicians of all time, past and present. At York University, where she was a professor of piano and musicology for 35 years, and is now a professor emerita, senior scholar, she received four of the institution’s highly prized Research Awards – one of only two in 2023 given Distinguished Honors as “outstanding contributors to their fields and beyond”, and in 2024 again being one of only two, this time for “Remarkable Artistic and Creative Accomplishments”.
Among Christina’s output of more than 60 albums are 19 concertos, nine of them written especially for her. In all, she has performed 55 concertos with orchestras in Canada and abroad, and solo and chamber works by contemporary and international composers.
Many are written by women – notably Canada’s Ann Southam, whose music she has recorded on multiple Centrediscs albums comprising eight discs. Four of her CDs have earned JUNO Awards nominations, three of them for concerto CDs, and one for Southam’s cycle Glass Houses Revisited, which is Centrediscs’ all-time best seller and was named one of “30 best Canadian classical recordings ever” by CBC Music. Her live performance of Southam’s Rivers cycle, with Toronto Dance Theatre, staged in Toronto, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and area and on an Eastern Canada tour, was nominated for a coveted DORA theatre award. The challenging solo piano work also inspired composer Frank Horvat to create his solo suite More Rivers for Christina, along with further projects relating to music and the environment. With a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the CD was released on Navona/Parma Records in 2025 to stellar reviews: “Gorgeous new record…healing meditative calm” (CBC Music’s In Concert Record of the Week), “The closing minutes of the performance are particularly exquisite” (Textura Reviews), and “Played with great virtuosity, discipline and control” (Opera Ramblings).
All credit to Christina Petrowska Quilico for an intelligent programme…. Challenging repertoire, well worth investigating."
She is legend."
Ever new accolades shower this “piano wizard” (Take Effect reviews) and “towering CD Games of the Night Wind. The “deeply textured” work, “played with great sensitivity” (Operaramblings) was inspired by the poems of David Cameron, Seán Haldane, Bruce Whiteman, and of Christina herself. Interspersing the Nocturnes are nighttime selections by Töru Takemitsu, Alexandre Tansman and Henryk Górecki. Raul da Gama in The WholeNote was taken with “how lovingly the pianist caresses the music that gives it a unique raptness” and “the composer’s sublime grasp of the form,” and was “enthralled by Petrowska Quilico’s performance.” It was yet another CBC Record of the Week.
The 10th anniversary of the passing of violinist Jacques Israelievitch, former long-serving concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony, was marked in 2025 with the launch of the six-CD Navona/Parma box set The Complete Mozart Sonatas and Variations for Piano & Violin, which Christina and Jacques had finished recording mere months before Israelievitch’s passing. “The duo’s playing is very fresh, with verve and moving intensity. The impression conveyed is of elegantly gripping musicians who want to show their enthusiasm for these pieces ... They succeed in doing so excellently” (Remy Franck, Pizzicato, Luxembourg).
This is how this music should be played. There is a feeling of freedom and ebullience in these performances that I attribute mainly to the wonderful Quilico, and she is one of the most satisfying pianists I have heard in this music.”
Joining forces with Canadian violin virtuoso Marc Djokic, Sinfonia Toronto and Maestro Nurhan Arman, Christina launched the Centrediscs CD Shadow & Light in 2023, adding three ambitious Canadian works to the sparse recorded duo concerto repertoire for violin and piano. It features Larysa Kuzmenko’s Skartaris (written for Christina), Christos Hatzis’s Arabesque, and Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Capriccio Ballo. Centrediscs subsequently released Ho’s solo piano album Blaze, recorded by Christina, who has recently recorded a second disc of Ho’s piano solos, The Imagined, and on May 16, 2026 will perform the world premiere of Pictures From An Imagined Exhibition, a piano concerto that Ho wrote especially for her, inspired in part by another of Christina’s talents, as a visual artist.
In fact, Christina’s paintings adorn the covers of Shadow & Light, Blaze, and a number of other albums in the last few years.
The towering Canadian piano virtuoso”
"A promethean talent…. an extraordinary talent with phenomenal ability….dazzling virtuosity”
Christina was born in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, of mainly Polish ancestry as well as Eastern European, German, Welsh, English and Scandinavian heritage. She came to Toronto to study with the celebrated piano pedagogue Boris Berlin, and at 10 made her orchestral debut, playing the Haydn D major concerto with Toronto’s Conservatory Orchestra. A scholarship took her to New York’s Juilliard School, where she came under the wing of the legendary Rosina Lhévinne. When at 14 she shared a concerto prize with pianist Murray Perahia, they were both lauded as “a promethean talent” by the New York Times for their performances of Mozart and Beethoven concertos. She continued to give solo and chamber recitals at many of the city’s venerated recital halls including Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls, garnering superlatives from the New York Times critics, who called her “an extraordinary talent with phenomenal ability” and referred to her “dazzling virtuosity”, playing Olivier Messiaen “to perfection”.
Studies followed at the Sorbonne in Paris, and with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti in Darmstadt and Berlin. Pierre Boulez coached her in two of his sonatas, which are featured on her 2021 Navona CD Sound Visionaries (“This primer of twentieth century French piano music gets better with each repeated listen.” – Pianomania, Singapore). John Cage also coached her for a performance of one of his major works.
She has gone on to travel widely, playing concertos from Bach and Haydn to present-day composers – under the batons of such international conductors as Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, and Bramwell Tovey, with orchestras across Canada and in the U.S., Greece and Taipei. In addition, recitals have taken her to England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The premieres of two of her recorded performances were truly out of this world – taken on board two space shuttles by Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean: David Mott’s concerto Eclipse (Centrediscs), written for her, debuted on the Space Shuttle Atlantis; and Alexina Louie’s Star-Filled Night, also written for her (later included on Christina’s CD Ings), went on his first mission on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Commanding pianism”
Among the many contemporary concertos she has performed in recent years are four 20th century works that have enjoyed few public performances in modern times – the concertos of America’s Florence Price, Poland’s Witold Lutosławski, and Canada’s Claude Champagne, and the long-lost Piano Concerto No. 4 by the “Canadian Mozart”, André Mathieu (1929-1968), reconstructed by Gilles Bellemare.
Christina’s first husband was Québec composer Michel-Georges Brégent, whose virtuosic works she has recorded on Centrediscs. Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich called him “the visionary mystic whom keen intelligence safely leads to undertake the wildest utopias. He is the man of complex structures, of instrumental virtuosity at the service of a generous and flamboyant expression.”
After his death she married the legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone Louis Quilico, C.C., one of the leading dramatic baritones of his day, who had an exceptional career as a major baritone in the world’s iconic opera houses and who lives on in his numerous recordings with the operatic legends of his generation. She and Louis toured in duo recitals, even after his retirement from the opera stage. They recorded four albums and wrote the book Mr. Rigoletto: In Conversation with Louis Quilico. The conversations taped for the book, both insightful and entertaining, are also available as both an audio and a video podcast series. Her pen-and-ink portraits of Louis in some of his greatest roles grace many pages in her book of drawings Opera Illustrated: An Artistic Odyssey, for which he contributed the preface and dedication. She also had her poetry published in New York in her early years in the collection Go Away Sisyphus. Scholarly essays and poetry were also published in many magazines and journals.
In memory of Louis, who died in 2000, she established the Christina and Louis Quilico Award to encourage opera singers in their careers. Administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation in conjunction with the Canadian Opera Company and the Ensemble Studio at the COC, it has given scholarships and awards to mezzo-sopranos Emily D’Angelo and Rihab Chaieb, and bass-baritone Gordon Bintner among many others, who have gone on to major international careers.
I didn’t think anyone would play this piece. But when Christina performed it, I loved the sound and what was happening as the hands interacted. And I loved the little tunes and motifs that could be heard in the interaction between the hands. It takes a whiz-bang pianist to make those heard. I don’t know how she does it!”
(fr) The Canadian Encyclopedia calls Christina Petrowska Quilico, C.M., O.Ont, FRSC, “one of Canada’s most celebrated pianists. She was invested into the Order of Canada “for her celebrated career as a classical and contemporary pianist, and for championing Canadian music.” She was appointed to The Order of Ontario “for opening the ears of music lovers through her performances and recordings, her teaching at York University and her establishment of The Christina and Louis Quilico Award at the Ontario Arts Foundation and Canadian Opera Company.”
She was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, “the country’s highest honor an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences.” When the Ontario Arts Council bestowed on her its prestigious Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance, the jurors praised her “astonishing contribution to musical life in Canada.” As they remarked: “Christina is a champion of Canadian composers – and her pioneering dedication to Canadian female composers is especially noteworthy. She has helped to secure this period of Canadian music through her impressive catalogue of recordings, and further through the ripple effect of her many students. She is steadfast. She is legend.”
She also holds the Friends of Canadian Music Award from the Canadian Music Centre and Canadian League of Composers and is one of the CMC’s Ambassadors of Canadian Music. After choosing her as one of 20 Can’t-Miss Classical Pianists and one of The 25 best Canadian classical pianists, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation inducted her into its In Concert Hall of Fame celebrating the greatest Canadian classical musicians of all time, past and present. At York University, where she was a professor of piano and musicology for 35 years, and is now a professor emerita, senior scholar, she received four of the institution’s highly prized Research Awards – one of only two in 2023 given Distinguished Honors as “outstanding contributors to their fields and beyond”, and in 2024 again being one of only two, this time for “Remarkable Artistic and Creative Accomplishments”.
Among Christina’s output of more than 60 albums are 19 concertos, nine of them written especially for her. In all, she has performed 55 concertos with orchestras in Canada and abroad, and solo and chamber works by contemporary and international composers.
Many are written by women – notably Canada’s Ann Southam, whose music she has recorded on multiple Centrediscs albums comprising eight discs. Four of her CDs have earned JUNO Awards nominations, three of them for concerto CDs, and one for Southam’s cycle Glass Houses Revisited, which is Centrediscs’ all-time best seller and was named one of “30 best Canadian classical recordings ever” by CBC Music. Her live performance of Southam’s Rivers cycle, with Toronto Dance Theatre, staged in Toronto, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and area and on an Eastern Canada tour, was nominated for a coveted DORA theatre award. The challenging solo piano work also inspired composer Frank Horvat to create his solo suite More Rivers for Christina, along with further projects relating to music and the environment. With a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the CD was released on Navona/Parma Records in 2025 to stellar reviews: “Gorgeous new record…healing meditative calm” (CBC Music’s In Concert Record of the Week), “The closing minutes of the performance are particularly exquisite” (Textura Reviews), and “Played with great virtuosity, discipline and control” (Opera Ramblings).
All credit to Christina Petrowska Quilico for an intelligent programme…. Challenging repertoire, well worth investigating." (fr)
She is legend." (fr)
(fr) Ever new accolades shower this “piano wizard” (Take Effect reviews) and “towering CD Games of the Night Wind. The “deeply textured” work, “played with great sensitivity” (Operaramblings) was inspired by the poems of David Cameron, Seán Haldane, Bruce Whiteman, and of Christina herself. Interspersing the Nocturnes are nighttime selections by Töru Takemitsu, Alexandre Tansman and Henryk Górecki. Raul da Gama in The WholeNote was taken with “how lovingly the pianist caresses the music that gives it a unique raptness” and “the composer’s sublime grasp of the form,” and was “enthralled by Petrowska Quilico’s performance.” It was yet another CBC Record of the Week.
The 10th anniversary of the passing of violinist Jacques Israelievitch, former long-serving concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony, was marked in 2025 with the launch of the six-CD Navona/Parma box set The Complete Mozart Sonatas and Variations for Piano & Violin, which Christina and Jacques had finished recording mere months before Israelievitch’s passing. “The duo’s playing is very fresh, with verve and moving intensity. The impression conveyed is of elegantly gripping musicians who want to show their enthusiasm for these pieces ... They succeed in doing so excellently” (Remy Franck, Pizzicato, Luxembourg).
This is how this music should be played. There is a feeling of freedom and ebullience in these performances that I attribute mainly to the wonderful Quilico, and she is one of the most satisfying pianists I have heard in this music.” (fr)
(fr) Joining forces with Canadian violin virtuoso Marc Djokic, Sinfonia Toronto and Maestro Nurhan Arman, Christina launched the Centrediscs CD Shadow & Light in 2023, adding three ambitious Canadian works to the sparse recorded duo concerto repertoire for violin and piano. It features Larysa Kuzmenko’s Skartaris (written for Christina), Christos Hatzis’s Arabesque, and Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Capriccio Ballo. Centrediscs subsequently released Ho’s solo piano album Blaze, recorded by Christina, who has recently recorded a second disc of Ho’s piano solos, The Imagined, and on May 16, 2026 will perform the world premiere of Pictures From An Imagined Exhibition, a piano concerto that Ho wrote especially for her, inspired in part by another of Christina’s talents, as a visual artist.
In fact, Christina’s paintings adorn the covers of Shadow & Light, Blaze, and a number of other albums in the last few years.
The towering Canadian piano virtuoso” (fr)
"A promethean talent…. an extraordinary talent with phenomenal ability….dazzling virtuosity” (fr)
(fr) Christina was born in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, of mainly Polish ancestry as well as Eastern European, German, Welsh, English and Scandinavian heritage. She came to Toronto to study with the celebrated piano pedagogue Boris Berlin, and at 10 made her orchestral debut, playing the Haydn D major concerto with Toronto’s Conservatory Orchestra. A scholarship took her to New York’s Juilliard School, where she came under the wing of the legendary Rosina Lhévinne. When at 14 she shared a concerto prize with pianist Murray Perahia, they were both lauded as “a promethean talent” by the New York Times for their performances of Mozart and Beethoven concertos. She continued to give solo and chamber recitals at many of the city’s venerated recital halls including Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls, garnering superlatives from the New York Times critics, who called her “an extraordinary talent with phenomenal ability” and referred to her “dazzling virtuosity”, playing Olivier Messiaen “to perfection”.
Studies followed at the Sorbonne in Paris, and with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti in Darmstadt and Berlin. Pierre Boulez coached her in two of his sonatas, which are featured on her 2021 Navona CD Sound Visionaries (“This primer of twentieth century French piano music gets better with each repeated listen.” – Pianomania, Singapore). John Cage also coached her for a performance of one of his major works.
She has gone on to travel widely, playing concertos from Bach and Haydn to present-day composers – under the batons of such international conductors as Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, and Bramwell Tovey, with orchestras across Canada and in the U.S., Greece and Taipei. In addition, recitals have taken her to England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The premieres of two of her recorded performances were truly out of this world – taken on board two space shuttles by Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean: David Mott’s concerto Eclipse (Centrediscs), written for her, debuted on the Space Shuttle Atlantis; and Alexina Louie’s Star-Filled Night, also written for her (later included on Christina’s CD Ings), went on his first mission on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Commanding pianism” (fr)
(fr) Among the many contemporary concertos she has performed in recent years are four 20th century works that have enjoyed few public performances in modern times – the concertos of America’s Florence Price, Poland’s Witold Lutosławski, and Canada’s Claude Champagne, and the long-lost Piano Concerto No. 4 by the “Canadian Mozart”, André Mathieu (1929-1968), reconstructed by Gilles Bellemare.
Christina’s first husband was Québec composer Michel-Georges Brégent, whose virtuosic works she has recorded on Centrediscs. Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich called him “the visionary mystic whom keen intelligence safely leads to undertake the wildest utopias. He is the man of complex structures, of instrumental virtuosity at the service of a generous and flamboyant expression.”
After his death she married the legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone Louis Quilico, C.C., one of the leading dramatic baritones of his day, who had an exceptional career as a major baritone in the world’s iconic opera houses and who lives on in his numerous recordings with the operatic legends of his generation. She and Louis toured in duo recitals, even after his retirement from the opera stage. They recorded four albums and wrote the book Mr. Rigoletto: In Conversation with Louis Quilico. The conversations taped for the book, both insightful and entertaining, are also available as both an audio and a video podcast series. Her pen-and-ink portraits of Louis in some of his greatest roles grace many pages in her book of drawings Opera Illustrated: An Artistic Odyssey, for which he contributed the preface and dedication. She also had her poetry published in New York in her early years in the collection Go Away Sisyphus. Scholarly essays and poetry were also published in many magazines and journals.
In memory of Louis, who died in 2000, she established the Christina and Louis Quilico Award to encourage opera singers in their careers. Administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation in conjunction with the Canadian Opera Company and the Ensemble Studio at the COC, it has given scholarships and awards to mezzo-sopranos Emily D’Angelo and Rihab Chaieb, and bass-baritone Gordon Bintner among many others, who have gone on to major international careers.
I didn’t think anyone would play this piece. But when Christina performed it, I loved the sound and what was happening as the hands interacted. And I loved the little tunes and motifs that could be heard in the interaction between the hands. It takes a whiz-bang pianist to make those heard. I don’t know how she does it!” (fr)