Damien Krzyzek
Collaborative pianist
Newman Performing Arts Center, 2344 East Iliff Ave., Denver, CO 80210
Professional Biography
Pianist Damien Krzyzek joined the collaborative piano staff at Lamont in 2022.
Damien has performed with members of the Boston Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the Borromeo and Verona Quartets. He has performed at Tanglewood Music Festival, Jordan Hall, and made his German debut in a program of David Amram’s chamber music at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe.
He can be heard in collaboration with soprano Margot Rood, saxophonist Ken Radnofsky, trumpeter Seelan Manickam and composer Heather Gilligan on the 2017 Albany Records release Living in Light.
From 2007 to 2022, Damien served on the faculty of New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts, where he taught collaborative piano, recital coaching, French and English diction and opera, as well as coaching singers and pianists in Russian and Czech song repertoire for NEC’s Liederabend series.
As a contributor to the field of opera, Damien played and coached more than forty productions with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and Opera Colorado. In 2014 he played the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s 27, starring Stephanie Blythe, and can be heard alongside members of the Saint Louis Symphony in the recording of that production.
Since returning to his native Colorado in 2022, Damien has served as the Denver/Boulder chapter head of Music for Food, an international musician-led initiative to combat food insecurity in our local communities. Learn more about Music for Food at www.musicforfood.net
Damien holds a Specialist Degree in Collaborative Piano from the University of Michigan, a Master of Music in Vocal Performance from University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, and a Bachelor of Arts in French and Spanish from the University of Colorado.
He has studied more than a dozen languages, and loves to read German and Scandinavian crime thrillers. A passionate devotee of word games and logic puzzles, he has solved more than 6,000 New York Times crosswords to date.
