French Dmytro Semykras thinks about performance as an act of transfer - something heard becomes something felt. If that moment of connection doesn’t happen, the evening hasn’t quite worked. Technical precision matters deeply to him, but it has never been the goal in itself. The goal is to dissolve the distance between music and listener, allowing audiences to experience a work not only through sound, but through genuine emotional engagement.

Currently studying at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz with Milana Chernyavska, Dmytro has built an increasingly international profile through performances across Europe and the United States. Recent highlights include First Prize at the Cantù International Piano Competition and the Île-de-France International Piano Competition in Paris. As a soloist he has appeared with the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música and the Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestra. He is also a founding member of a piano trio now in its fourth year, performing across Europe and the United States — an ensemble through which chamber music has become as central to his artistic life as the solo recital.

What distinguishes Dmytro’s work most clearly is the way he constructs programs. Rather than treating a concert as a sequence of individual pieces, he builds around an idea - a question, an emotional territory, a thread running across centuries. One project traces sonata form from Scarlatti through to Prokofiev: the same architectural instinct, refracted through very different minds across three hundred years. Another, which he calls “Dreams,” brings together Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Prokofiev, and Ravel around a shared emotional territory -  the way artists of great maturity look back at childhood. The pieces come from different countries, different eras, different musical languages, and yet placed together they seem to be in quiet conversation with one another.

At the heart of Dmytro’s work is a belief that music is most powerful when it creates a shared experience between performer and audience. Through thoughtful programming, collaborative exploration, and a deep commitment to the expressive possibilities of the piano, he strives to create performances that resonate long after the final note has faded.