“Of Finghin Collins as soloist, little needs to be said that has not been said before: he is exceptionally fluent, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally sensitive, responding to every possible nuance that Stanford prescribes.”
Piers Burton-Page, International Record Review
One of Ireland’s most successful musicians, Finghin Collins was born in Dublin in 1977 and, following initial lessons with his sister Mary, studied piano at the Royal Irish Academy of Music with John O’Conor and at the Geneva Conservatoire with Dominique Merlet. Winner of multiple awards in his native Ireland, he went on to take first prize at the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland in 1999. Since then he has continued to enjoy a flourishing international career that takes him all over Europe and the United States, as well to the Far East and Australia.
Collins has performed with such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, garnering consistent praise from critics and public alike. Conductors with whom he has collaborated include Frans Brüggen, Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph Eschenbach, Hans Graf, Emmanuel Krivine, Nicholas McGegan, Gianandrea Noseda, Sakari Oramo, Tadaaki Otaka, Heinrich Schiff, Vassily Sinaisky, Leonard Slatkin and Gábor Tákacs-Nagy. He has also given solo recitals in many of the world’s most prestigious halls and participates frequently in chamber music festivals with a variety of colleagues of international standing.
In recent years Collins has performed at such festivals as the Verbier and Zermatt Festivals in Switzerland and Piano aux Jacobins and Nohant Festival Chopin in France. During the 2025/26 season Collins will return to the Wigmore Hall in London; his calendar also includes engagements in Korea, Switzerland, Mexico, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus.
Over the past two decades Collins has developed a close relationship with Claves Records in Switzerland, recording two double CDs of Schumann’s piano music (which won numerous awards including Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice in 2006), followed by a recording of works for piano and orchestra by Charles V. Stanford with the RTÉ NSO / Kenneth Montgomery (Editor’s Choice, May 2011). In May 2013, Ireland’s classical radio station RTÉ lyric fm launched his recording of four Mozart piano concertos directed from the keyboard with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. A Chopin recital CD was released in 2017, a co-production between RTÉ lyric fm and Claves Records, while in spring 2020 Claves released a recording of the Mozart Piano Quartets with Rosanne Philippens (violin), Máté Szücs (viola) and István Várdai (cello). This was followed in 2022 by a solo album The Bright Day is Done featuring diverse pieces inspired by the cyclical nature of night and day.
Finghin Collins makes a significant contribution to the musical landscape of his native Ireland, where he resides. Since 2013, he has been Artistic Director of Music for Galway. He is also the founding Artistic Director, since 2006, of the New Ross Piano Festival in Wexford as well as the Artistic Director, since 2023, of the Dublin International Piano Competition.
Collins is the Chairman of the jury of the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland in 2023 and 2025.
In 2017, the National University of Ireland conferred on him an honorary Degree of Doctor of Music.