Born in 1949 in Paris, Michael Levinas attended the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Paris, studying piano with Vlado Perlumuter, Yvonne Lefébure, Yvonne Loriod, and with Olivier Messiaen in composition. In 1974, he co-founded L’Itinéraire, and was a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome. His training as a composer provided him with a pianistic style and an instrumental education that retraced the history of performance from the end of the Baroque period all the way to the music of the 20^th century. At the same time, it is likely his pianist’s ear, and the way it shaped sound from the instrument, inspired him as a composer - an acoustic explorer.

As a composer, Michaël Levinas has always explored timbre and acoustics, notably in pieces such as Appels, Ouverture pour une fête étrange, or La Conférence des Oiseaux. He also explores the foundational question of the relationship between text and music - this stands out, notably, in works such as Les Aragon (1998), as well as in his masterful compositions for the stage, the opera Go-gol (1996) based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, which was premiered by the Festival Musica de Strasbourg, IRCAM, and the Opéra de Montpellier, directed by Daniel Mesguich. The opera Les Nègres, based on the Jean Genet play, with a libretto written by Levinas himself, was commissioned by the Opéra National de Lyon and the Opéra de Genève, and premiered in 2004, directed by Stanislas Nordey; a new production was staged at Theater Freiburg in 2006. A third opera,La Métamorphose, after the Franz Kafka text, premiered in March 2011 at the Opéra de Lille. In 2015, Le Petit Prince, based on the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, premiered at the Opéra de Lausanne, directed by Lilo Baur.

Levinas’s piano recordings, from Bach to Boulez, are critically acclaimed, including his first recording of Schumann, showcased at the MIDEM Classique trade show, as well as the complete Beethoven Sonatas, Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” the complete Etudes of Scriabine, and Double face, an album of compositions by Levinas and Ligeti.

Levinas has performed the complete Beethoven Sonatas in concert in Paris at the Salle Gaveau, as well as several Atelier du musicien broadcasts on Radio France Musique, also dedicated to this corpus. In 2004, he toured a performance of Bach’s complete Well-Tempered Clavier, which launched at the concert hall of the Cité de la Musique in Paris. The tour was linked to the premiere of his opera Les Nègres, which was performed more than twenty times at the Opéra de Lyon and the Opéra de Genève. On the opera’s rest days, Michaël Levinas performed the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier at the two theaters.

Levinas has been a guest of Europe’s major contemporary music festivals, performing the works of Stockhausen, Boulez, Messiaen, and Ligeti. He has premiered many compositions, including those of Nunes and Murail. For him, the vocation of pianist and that of composer are intimately connected. His pieces have been performed by major contemporary performers in France and abroad. He has been a guest professor of composition in the world’s most prestigious institutions for music composition, including the Darmstadt summer courses, Royaumont, and the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona.

Michaël Levinas is a professor at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP). On 18 March 2009 he was elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, of chich he was elected in 2023 President for the year