CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Isabel Bayrakdarian
Serouj Kradjian

Zankel Hall
Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Isabel Bayrakdarian, Soprano
Serouj Kradjian, Piano

BELLINI Composizioni da Camera
·· Vaga luna, che argenti
·· Per pieta, bell'idol mio
·· La Ricordanza
POULENC Banalités
·· Chansons d'Orkenise
·· Hôtel
·· Fagnes de Wallonie
·· Voyage à Paris
·· Sanglots
JAKE HEGGIE Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia
·· Ophelia's Song
·· Women Have Loved Before
·· Not in a Silver Casket
·· Spring
BERLIOZ "La Mort d'Ophélie," Op. 18, No. 2
REVEREND GOMIDAS Armenian Folk Songs
·· Dear Maral
·· Call to the Sea
·· Lullaby
·· I Cannot Play
·· Mount Alakyaz- Incense Tree
RAVEL Cinq mélodies populaires grecques
·· Chanson de la mariée
·· Là-bas, vers l’église
·· Quel galant m’est comparable
·· Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques
·· Tout gai!
RAVEL Tripathos
FERNARDO OBRADORS Spanish Folk Songs
·· La mi sola, Laureola
·· Dame amor besos sin cuento
·· Corazon por que pasais
·· Del majo celoso
·· El vito

This concert and the Pure Voice series are sponsored by the Jean & Jula Goldwurm Memorial Foundation in memory of Jula Goldwurm.

Program Notes:

By Susan Youens

FRANCIS POULENC Banalites
Born January 7, 1899, in Paris; died there January 20, 1963.

Francis Poulenc saw Guillaume Apollinaire (the half-Italian/Swiss, half Italian/Polish illegitimate son of Angelica Alexandrine Kostroviski and Francesco Flugi d’Aspermont) for the first time in late 1916, although he had already become embroiled in the great avant-garde poet’s verse several years earlier. Many years later, in 1950, the composer told an interviewer, “I find myself able to compose music only to poetry with which I feel total contact—a contact transcending mere admiration. This quality is one I felt for the first time when I encountered the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire. That was in 1912, when I was 13.” The poet died in the great flu pandemic of 1918 when Poulenc was still a teenager, but his importance in Poulenc’s life can hardly be overstated: by 1954, he had composed 34 songs to Apollinaire’s poetry. The set of five songs collectively entitled Banalités (Banalities) is a war-time work, composed in 1940 shortly after Poulenc was demobilized as the result of the disgraceful treaty between France’s head of state, Philippe Pétain, and Hitler. This is one of Poulenc’s most popular works and no wonder: here, we encounter him in five different but characteristic moods.

“Chanson d’Orkenise” is a fake folk song (but filled with sophisticated nuances) about a wanderer and a wagon driver, the one leaving his heart behind in the town with a musical name and the other bringing his heart there. “Hôtel” is the musical distillation of utter languorous laziness. Anyone who has ever been alone in a hotel room and wanted only to lie in a state of complete torpor while smoking one of France’s pungent cigarettes will recognize the state of mind imprinted in these bars. All that anyone with a smattering of French needs to do in order to grasp the intrinsic musicality of Apollinaire’s “Fagnes de Wallonie” is to read it aloud, especially toward the end (“Nord / Nord / La vie s’y tord / En arbres forts / Et tors / La vie y mord / La mort / À belles dents / Quand bruit le vent”), and Poulenc adds actual music to the verbal melodies. “Voyage à Paris,” a giddy whirl of a waltz-song, captures in a nutshell Poulenc’s undiluted joy upon returning to the city he loved most. “For me,” he wrote, “Paris often brings tears to my eyes and music to my ears.” Poulenc and the great French baritone Pierre Bernac used to perform this song as a slightly malicious encore at the end of recitals in the provinces. In contrast to such madcap Parisian gaiety, “Sanglots” is Poulenc in philosophical mode, appropriate for Apollinaire’s brooding reflection on humanity’s shared tragedy of love throughout all the world and Time. From Ultima Thule (an unknown island in the North Sea, called “ultima” by the ancients for its vast distance from the continent) to Ophir (again, an unknown ancient region celebrated for its treasures of gemstones and gold), human beings, enslaved by fate, have died for love, and we in our turn become like the dead who went before.


JAKE HEGGIE Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia
Born March 31, 1961, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Jake Heggie, in addition to his acclaimed operas Dead Man Walking and The End of the Affair, has composed some 200 songs. He is also a gifted poet and wrote the text for “Ophelia’s Song”—the first of the Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia—himself. In this additional mad song given to Shakespeare’s character, she either sings while drowning or perhaps after (maybe both); we hardly know whether this is in medias res of immersion in the “water so cold” or her ghost speaking after incarceration in the green earth. Heggie begins the song with a spray of shimmering treble droplets in the piano, followed by funereal low tones near the bottom of the keyboard before Ophelia sings a crystalline, tragically warped imitation of folk song. The remaining three texts come from the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923. Millay was a fascinating woman, remarkable for her defiance of convention, for affairs both with men and women, and for poetry now receiving greater critical due after a period of scorn by more modernist men. The texts of “Women Have Loved Before” and “Not in a Silver Casket” come from a sequence of 52 sonnets collectively entitled Fatal Interview, the title taken from John Donne’s “Elegy 16”: “By our first strange and fatal interview, / By all desires which thereof did ensue.” (These are English in their formal structure, not Petrarchan, with three quatrains in the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef capped off by a final rhyming couplet gg.) These poems are a detailed self-portrait of a woman in thrall to passion, mapped through all four seasons and the 52 weeks of the year; unlike other famous sonnet sequences, the woman is the initiator, aggressor, and controller of the affair as well as its victim, sufferer, and survivor. The cycle was born in part from Millay’s extramarital affair in real life with a young poet named George Dillon, some 15 years her junior who would eventually reject her (although he was destroyed by the affair). In sonnet no. 26, “Women Have Loved Before,” desire carries the persona from her immediate time and place to the realms in which such mythic figures as Isolde and Helen, heedless of fatal consequences, loved in the same unregenerate, unabashedly sexual way. Heggie intersperses the singer’s sighs of passion with horn-call figures that will remind some of the hunting horns in Wagner’s forest when Isolde and Tristan have their “fatal interview” in act 2 of one of the world’s most famous operas. The rhyming couplet at the end of Millay’s sonnet proclaims both the woman’s recognition of fatality in the offing and her refusal to let such awareness deter her from the experience of passion; Heggie’s musical rendition “death upon the tread” strikes to the heart. In the 11th sonnet, “Not in a Silver Casket,” the woman assures her beloved that she does not give her love symbolically or deceptively but with childlike generosity and honesty, thus absolving herself for a moment of guilt arising from her own sexual feelings. Once again, Millay is in conversation with Donne, who in “The Token” asked his lover to “Send me some token, that my hope may live”; Millay rejects the need for pledges of passion and offers “Love in the open hand, no thing but that,” love freely admitted “as children do”—but it is a woman, not a child, who proclaims her desire so emphatically at the end of this song. “Spring” is Millay’s first poem in free verse and one of her best-known works. At a time when the opening of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (“April is the cruelest month”) reverberated everywhere, Millay gives us an Ophelia-like April who enters the stage “like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” In this modernist poem, no beauty, whether from spring or from poetry, can lend meaning to life; spring tries to deceive us into believing that there are no cycles of life and death, spring and winter, that its beauty is eternal, but the persona rejects this denial of death’s cold, hard facts.


RICHARD STRAUSS Drei Lieder der Ophelia, Op. 67
Born June 11, 1864, in Munich; died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

“Actually, I like my songs best,” Richard Strauss once said to the great singer Hans Hotter, a statement that should perhaps have been accompanied by a pinch or two of salt, given his dedication to opera. But it is true that within the concentrated brevity of song forms, he could experiment with musical ideas to be transferred later to the broader canvas of opera, and he knew that many of his songs were artistic gems. He had a lifelong love affair with the soprano voice: his wife, the redoubtable Pauline de Ahna, was a soprano for whom he composed “Morgen” and the other songs of Op. 27 as a wedding gift in 1894. But the Drei Lieder der Ophelia were in part the result of a dispute with a publisher (Strauss and publishers were often oil and water). Beginning in 1903, the Berlin firm of Bote & Bock had an exclusive option on Strauss’s songs, and Strauss wanted out; when Bote & Bock refused, Strauss had his revenge in the form of a satiric—libelous, actually—cycle entitled Krämerspiegel (Shopkeeper’s Mirror). The publishers were not amused and sued for breach of contract. When the court ordered Strauss to provide “proper” songs, he “obliged” in the spring of 1918 with six of his most innovative, recondite songs, the first three being settings of Ophelia’s mad songs in Hamlet and last three songs to poems from the “Book of Ill-Humor” in Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (The East-West Anthology—inspired by Persian poetry). Nowadays, we know the worth of these wonderful songs, but at the time, they were not what Bote & Bock would have considered easily saleable or popular material.

The Ophelia songs are representations of madness by a composer who must have contemplated the boundary between sanity and derangement all too often, given his mother Josephine Strauss’s long history of mental illness. Ophelia is, of course, perhaps the most famous madwoman in literary history, Polonius’s beautiful daughter driven mad by her lover Hamlet’s complex compound of torment, love, thoughts of incest, lust for vengeance, revulsion against all things sexual, and obsession with death. She sings, “How should I your true love know?”, “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day,” and “They bore him barefac’d on the bier” in Act IV, Scene 5, when she is “divided from herself and her fair judgment;” after the second song, she leaves, then returns “fantastically dressed with straws and flowers” to sing her last words. Composers have long been fascinated by “mad music,” and Strauss, in “Wie erkenn ich mein Treulieb vor andern nun?”, fills the air with gently warped strains, distortions in which we can dimly recognize shapes once symmetrical and located in an identifiable tonal space . . . but no longer. Twice, unalloyed beauty briefly peers through the sounding craziness to heart-stopping effect, the first time when Ophelia invokes the sandals worn by penitent sinners (the scallop shell on the hat is another emblem of pilgrims in search of divine forgiveness) and the second time at the shattering invocation of “love’s showers” [of tears] just before the piano postlude that returns us to the soft insanity of the beginning. Over and over in this song, we hear tritone intervals, an “open” sound that medieval musicians called “diabolus in musica,” the devil in music. “Guten Morgen, ’s ist Sankt Valentinstag” shows how Hamlet’s sexual disgust has infected his fiancée’s mind; here, madness is made evident by different means than the first song, by “nonsense” progressions of unrelated harmonies and, most of all, by a hectic, fevered jangle of parallel major and minor chords, as if she is incapable of deciding whether to be merry or sad and hence switches back and forth without rhyme or reason. In Strauss’s imagination, “Sie trugen ihn aus der Bahre bloß” is an eerie premonition both of Hamlet’s and her own death to come. To liquid strains in the right hand, flowing, slipping, and sliding like the water in which she is soon to drown, Ophelia bids a last farewell to her beloved; anyone who hears the supremely tender invocation, “meine Taube” (my dove), and is not moved by it probably lacks a pulse. In between the funereal-watery passages are sudden interruptions by a hectic waltz, an invocation from within the depths of madness of a dance at the fair with “Mein junger frischer Hansel” (the Teutonic version of Shakespeare’s “bonny sweet Robin”). Strauss grafts onto the end Ophelia’s final words immediately following her last mad song, their pathos and gentle dignity unforgettable: “And of all Christian souls, I pray God.—God b’ wi’ ye.”


REVEREND GOMIDAS Armenian Folk Songs
Born October 8, 1869, in Kütahya, Turkey; died October 22, 1935, in Paris.

Soghomon Soghomonian is better known by his religious name Gomidas or Komitas, which he took in honor of a noted seventh-century Armenian writer of hymns; the word “Vartabed” indicates his status as a priest and church scholar in the Armenian Apostolic Church. He spent much of his time in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century traveling through various Armenian provinces and villages in order to transcribe native songs and dances, which he arranged as choral music for his 300-member choir in Constantinople. After the 1915 massacres of the Armenian people, he succumbed to mental and physical anguish, the diagnostic causes not entirely clear but permanent thereafter. In 1919, he was moved to Paris, where he died in the Villejuif psychiatric clinic in 1935, his last 20 years the saddest of tragedies. He is revered in his native land as the “Bach, Schubert, and Bartók” of Armenia: “Bach” because of his religious music, “Schubert” because he virtually invented the Armenian art song, and “Bartók” because of his activities as a collector of traditional music. There is a large statue of him in the capital city of Yerevan in which his legs are portrayed as tree trunks rooted in the soil of his native land. The first song, “Dear Maral,” is a haunting mixture of love song and threnody, while the second song, “Call to the Sea,” is an exile’s lament set to words by the 19th-century Armenian poet Raphael Patkanian, also known as Kamar Katiba. He wrote many of his works during the Turkish-Russian War, when Russian Armenians (he was born in southern Russia) hoped for the liberation of Turkish Armenia from the Ottoman Empire; Armenians post-1915 read his prophetic words against the backdrop of a holocaust that took place 23 years after his death. “Kele, kele/Walking, Swaying” also mingles love and grief in uniquely Armenian mode; “Koon yeghir” is a tender lullaby; and “Mount Alagyaz—Incense tree” is a delicately hypnotic love-call.


MAURICE RAVEL Cinq chansons populaires grecques; “Tripatos”
Born March 7, l875, in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France; died December 28, 1937, in Paris.

In the first years of the 20th century, a French Hellenist named Hubert Octave Pernot (1870–1946), in company with a Greek colleague named Pericles Matsa, collected various Greek popular songs. Subsequently, a French musicologist named Pierre Aubry (known as a medievalist) planned to give a lecture on the songs of the oppressed Greeks and Armenians; he asked the critic and musicologist Michel Calvocoressi—a multi-lingual scholar who wrote about Russian and Hungarian music, among much else—to select some Greek songs as illustrations. Calvocoressi taught the singer Louise Thomasset to produce the texts phonetically; when she wanted piano accompaniments, he turned to Ravel, who wrote accompaniments for five melodies in some 36 hours. This was his first foray into folklore; having discovered a penchant for sophisticated arrangements of folk poetry and song (12 of his 39 songs belong to this category), he would also turn to Spain, France, Scotland—via Robert Burns—Italy, and the Jewish people for other such songs. Of the five songs performed by Mlle Thomasset, only two (Nos. 3 and 4) were later incorporated into the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques; Ravel set three other melodies at a later date. He admired the singer Marguerite Babaïan’s performance of the folk melodies at a lecture recital Calvocoressi gave during the 1905–06 season, and therefore he set a sixth melody—“Tripatos”—for her in 1909. In the “Chanson de la mariée,” the sweetest of wedding bells already chime throughout as an ardent lover bids the woman he wishes to marry awake and receive his adoration. “In our two families, everyone is related,” he tells her; one imagines a tiny whitewashed village on the island of Chios or elsewhere in Greece. In his idiosyncratic fashion, Ravel alternates open-air clear sounds with delicate dissonances largely in the piano’s treble register, the bell-like overtones heightening the poignant charm of this song. More bells alternating open-air clarity with soft pinpricks of dissonance sound throughout the second song, “Là-bas, vers l’église,” which sways slowly between bars or groups of bars with three beats and those with two beats. “Quel galant m’est comparable” is an irresistibly cheeky compound of boasting, swaggering, and a lover’s pleading to the lady Vassiliki. One can almost hear the clang of the tambourine accompanying the whirling dance steps that sound in between the lover’s declarations of his superiority to all other suitors and his choice of her, only her, as his beloved. The merry dance strains die away; we will never know whether she responded to his ardor. In “Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques,” the maidens harvesting mastic (an evergreen shrub or small tree, Pistacia lentiscus, cultivated on Chios for its aromatic resin) look upon a beautiful young man as he passes and sing of their desire for someone beyond their reach. The next song, “Tout gai!”, is an irresistible invitation to the dance, the text not quite coherent because sung while in full fling, the singer distracted by the sight of lovely legs in joyous activity. “Tripatos” was composed in 1909 and first published in 1938 as a “danse chantée” (sung dance); it begins as a meltingly sensuous, slightly melancholy air and then devolves into an irresistible dance. Its rhapsodic melismas on nonsense syllables dominated by liquid “l”s (Tralila lalala lilili la) are sheer exoticism in music. Whatever the inimitably French veil thrown over the proceedings by Ravel, we feel as if transported to some sun-washed Greek village.


FERNANDO J. OBRADORS Spanish Folk Songs
Born 1897, in Barcelona; died there 1945.

Ferran Jaumandreu Obradors, or Fernando Obradors, was a Catalan composer, a musical autodidact who became conductor of the Gran Canaria Philharmonic Orchestra and later taught at Las Palmas Conservatory in Barcelona. Between 1921 and 1941, he created four volumes of settings of classic Spanish poetry, including a poem by his friend Federico García Lorca; despite his orchestral works and operas, he is best-known today for the set of songs entitled Canciones clásicas españolas. “La mi sola, Laureola” is the setting of a 16th-century poem that tells of utter adoration for the beloved Laureola. Obradors alternates between three mosaic sections in three different tempos: 1) an unaccompanied Andante section in a wistful-sounding modal minor, with haunting echoes of the word “sola, sola, sola” (only, only, only); 2) a canonic version of the same theme for the piano only; and 3) a slow, worshipful central section. The text of “Al amor” comes from the poetry of Cristóbal de Castillejo, poet and secretary to the Spanish-born Ferdinand, Emperor of Germany; his satires garnered him the disapproval of the Inquisition, and he was a champion of traditional Spanish forms of verse. This delightfully insatiate love poem, modeled on an erotic “carmina” by Catullus, is a plea to the beloved for kisses by the thousands; in Obrador’s setting, one can hear both the lover’s ebullience and desire made manifest as descending chromatic figures. “Corazón, porqué pasáis?” is a study in nocturnal restlessness, music for those who toss and turn and cannot stop thinking of the lovers who have left them for someone else. “Majos” and “majas” were the Madrid “smart set” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; originating in the lower classes, they were noted for their style and verve, for elaborate fashions preserved for our gaze in Francisco Goya’s paintings. In “El majo celoso,” a canny maja tells a jealous majo that she loves only him; he has been told that she is seeing another, but he is not to believe it. And finally, in “El vito,” Obradors first strikes up wild, energetic strains in the piano, full of the brusque, dissonant chords that evoke the strumming of guitars in Spanish music—and then issues a seductive invitation to the “dance” the persona has purchased, with old women less expensive than young girls for those with little cash at hand.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Youens’s writings on lieder include Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin and Schubert’s
Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles, both published by Cambridge University Press.

Isabel Bayrakdarian, Soprano
Isabel Bayrakdarian won first prize in the 2000 Operalia competition and has since performed in many of the world’s major opera houses, most recently in her Royal Opera House debut as Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. The young Armenian-Canadian soprano is admired as much for her stunning stage presence as for her exceptional musicality, and she has followed a career path completely her own. Her most famous roles are in Mozart operas, which have included Susanna, Zerlina in Don Giovanni and Pamina in The Magic Flute have been her calling cards, along with Marzelline in Fidelio, Adina in L’elisir d'amore and Rosina in The Barber of Seville. But these are only a few of the roles in her rocketing career. Ms. Bayrakdarian sang Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo to signature success at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Cleopatra (Giulio Cesare), Romilda (Xerxes), and Emilia (Flavio) demonstrate her tremendous skills as a Handelian.

In the 2007–08 season Ms. Bayrakdarian reprises Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro , at the Canadian Opera Company and the Bayerische Staatsoper conducted by Peter Schneider. She will return to the Canadian Opera Company to debut the role of Mélisande in Pélleas et Mélisande, as well as perform her role debut as Norina in Don Pasquale with Opera Colorado. Ms. Bayrakdarian also appears in recital with her husband and frequent collaborator, Serouj Kradjian, at the Schubert Club, the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City, and at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

Ms. Bayrakdarian has been applauded for opera performances in Chicago, Dresden, London, Milan, New York, Paris, Salzburg, San Francisco and Toronto, and is renowned as well for her work in more remote operas of the repertory, such as Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini and Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge, in which she made her Metropolitan Opera debut.

Highlights of Ms. Bayrakdarian’s recent seasons have included performances of Julie Taymour’s sensational production Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, as Pamina at the Metropolitan Opera and her engaging performance on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera as Susanna opposite Bryn Terfel's Figaro in Act I of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. In 2006 she also sang Zerlina at the Salzburg Festival’s celebration of Mozart’s birthday, and in Le nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden and the Houston Grand Opera. Last season, Ms. Bayrakdarian also returned to the Lyric Opera of Chicago for her role debut as Blanche in Robert Carsen’s production of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, where she triumphed in the 2006 new production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.

Ms. Bayrakdarian’s orchestral appearances last season included debuts with the Chicago and Montreal Symphonies – both in the Mahler Fourth Symphony – with conductors David Zinman and James Conlon respectively.

Often partnered by her husband, pianist Serouj Kradjian, Ms. Bayrakdarian has also triumphed in recital in New York’s Carnegie Hall, in Atlanta, Berkeley, Boston, Edmonton, Ottawa, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere. Last season they toured Canada together, and performed at New York’s newest recital space – the Gilder Lehrman hall in the Morgan Library, as well as in Palm Beach, Toronto, Savannah and Tokyo. Continuing her passion for wide-ranging repertoire, Ms. Bayrakdarian presented her first evening of tangos in a concert at Toronto’s new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, and she participated in world-premiere performances of Jake Heggie and Gene Sheer’s one-act opera To Hell and Back. Her co-star in To Hell and Back is Broadway star Patti LuPone, and they were accompanied by San Francisco ’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, under its music director Nicholas McGegan.

Ms. Bayrakdarian concertizes with orchestras in San Francisco, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, and at home in Canada with the Toronto and Montreal Symphonies, Tafelmusik, Les Violons du Roy, the National Arts Centre Orchestra and other major Canadian performing organizations, as well as with numerous groups in Europe.

Isabel Bayrakdarian sings on the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack of the blockbuster film The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, and her voice can also be heard in the multiple award-winning Canadian film Ararat. Ms. Bayrakdarian’s widely-praised recording of songs by singer/composer Pauline Viardot-Garcia brought her a third Juno award for “Best Classical Album”, Canada’s highest recording prize. Azulão is a disc of songs by Spanish composers, and on Cleopatra she portrays the Egyptian queen in arias from several Baroque operas. Her first solo CD, Joyous Light, presents Armenian sacred music. She has also recorded Mahler’s Second Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.

Isabel Bayrakdarian has received many grants and other awards in addition to the first prize in the Operalia: four Juno awards, the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal, the 2005 Virginia Parker Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Leonie Rysanek Award from the George London Foundation, and a Metropolitan Opera National Council Award in 1997.

Born in Lebanon of proud Armenian heritage, and now a citizen of Canada, Ms. Bayrakdarian moved with her family to Toronto as a teenager. Her earliest singing experience was at church, which remains—along with her family – the central focus of her life. She is the subject of a CBC-TV film entitled A Long Journey Home that documents her first trip to Armenia; on another trip there recently she recorded a disc of songs by the country’s national composer, Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935), with her husband and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra. She holds an honors degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto.

Serouj Kradjian, Piano
Juno Award-winning Canadian-Armenian pianist Serouj Kradjian has been described as "a keyboard acrobat" of "crystal virtuosity", having "fiery temperament and elegant sound" with "a technique to burn."

Mr. Kradjian's concert performances have included Rachmaninoff's Second and Third Piano Concerti with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Shostakovitch First Concerto in Madrid, both Liszt Piano Concertos with Germany's Göttingen Symphony, the Khachaturian Piano Concerto in Toronto, Mozart performances with the Vancouver and Edmonton Symphonies, and his recital debut at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Solo and chamber music recitals have taken Mr. Kradjian from such Canadian cities as Toronto (Roy Thomson Hall and Toronto Centre for the Arts), Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver (Orpheum Theatre), and Edmonton (Winspear Centre), via the U.S – New York (Carnegie Hall), Atlanta (Spivey Hall), Miami, Chicago (Cultural Center) and Los Angeles – to European concert halls in Paris, Düsseldorf, Hanover, Munich, Salzburg, Lausanne, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. He has played as far north as Norway's Trondheim and Bergen Festival, and as far east as Nicosia, Cyprus and Tokyo, Japan.

His concerts have been broadcast by the CBC, Radio de la Suisse Romande, Radio and TV España, the BBC, the Süddeutsche Rundfunk and NHK Japan.

Serouj Kradjian's solo discography includes the highly acclaimed traversals of Franz Liszt's Transcendental Etudes, released by Warner Music Spain and Liszt's Piano Concertos.His second solo disc entitled “Hommage à Paganini” with works by Brahms, Schumann, Chopin,Liszt and Rachmaninoff will be released in 2007. “Miniatures,” an anthology of music written by Armenian composers, and Robert Schumann's three Sonatas for Violin and Piano (with Ara Malikian) are both Hänssler Classic releases. In 2002, he began working with soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, accompanying her in recitals in Canada and the United States. Their disc of songs by Pauline Viardot-Garcia was released in 2005 on the Analekta label, bringing the two artists, who are a married couple, international accolades and a 2006 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year.

Works composed or arranged by Serouj Kradjian have been performed by such orchestras as I Musici Montreal and the Vancouver Symphony. He has especially enjoyed exploring and performing tangos by Astor Piazzolla, and his orchestral arrangements of folk songs by Gomidas – Armenia's national composer – were recently recorded and will be released in 2007 on Nonesuch Records. Kradjian was also founder and music director of Camerata Creativa in Madrid, Spain, a chamber orchestra dedicated to the performance of contemporary works.

Serouj Kradjian began his studies at the age of five, and by seven had won a National Competition for Young Musicians. At fourteen he earned a scholarship to study in Vienna, and later studied with Marietta Orlov at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, where he earned a B.A. in Piano Performance in 1994. He studied with Einar Steen-Nökleberg at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hanover, receiving the coveted Solo Performance degree in 2001.

Mr. Kradjian's talent has been acknowledged by the Chalmers Grant of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.

Serouj Kradjian is an exclusive recording artist of Warner Music Spain.